The Book of Kings

Rating:
Summary: Worth reading, undeservedly panned.
Review: After having read this book, I must take serious exception to the detractors that have given this book an undeserved thumbs down. It is frankly dirty pool to compare it unfavorably to War and Peace, one of the great historical novels of all times. It is likewise unfair to criticize the author as being full of himself, or unable to write in a manner in which people speak; that is what may be termed style. It is also disingenuous to admire the typeface as the only redeeming quality of the book. How about criticizing Proust as being wordy? That the prose is self conscious adds, to my mind, a kind of period authenticity. Much of the writing of the time was similarly stilted. Look, for example at Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, Robert Musil's Man without Qualities, or Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, each of which compares favorably to this book, and none gets such an undesrved bashing. Upton Sinclair won a Pulitzer for the Lanny Budd novels with this self-conscious prose and none of the substance herein. Thackery and Trollope were every bit as convoluted. It seems that the critics should cut Mr. Thackara some slack; just sit down and enjoy the journey.

The story traces four friends, two principally, through prewar and subsequently war-torn Europe, elaborately staged from drawing-room to battlefield. The prose is indeed ornate, but after all this was a time of demagogues and hyperbole. My sole criticism is that it is far from unexplored country. Like an old silver mine, all the nuggets have been carried away long ago. It is prettty derivative stuff. It is not a new idea that the reality of war makes disillusionment of ideals. Still, this is a story that needs to be told lest we forget. We watch Grand Illusion now, realizing that it is as compelling as it was more than a half a century ago, although the acting seems wooden and it is in black and white. We have not as a society had to face a loss of innocence for some time, and perhaps that is the best reason to read this period piece and be caught up in the hubris of a near forgotten past.

Rating:
Summary: Sometimes interesting but never compelling.
Review: Although I agree with the other reviewers that the prose is awful, that was not my major problem with Mr. Thackara's novel. Instead, I found the behavior of almost all of his characters incomprehensible in one way or another. They have these strange reversals of positions that are not adequately accounted for; misunderstandings arise between them that would never occur if the characters were actually the people that they had initially been drawn to be; instead it seems Mr. Thackara justs molds them at will as necessary to suit his story. Hasty ex post rationales are then sometimes tacked on to explain their behavior.
In War and Peace, the echoes of which you can clearly trace in the characters and plot of Mr. Thackara's novel (and to which he himself pays homage to in the words of Baron von Sunda), all of the characters, e.g., Prince Andrei, Rostov, Natasha, Pierre, were real people whom I understood and felt for even when, especially when, they made tragic choices, labored in ignorance or doubt, or when, through great suffering, they were transformed. I did not buy The Book of Kings with the expection of encountering the art of Tolstoy but I did expect to meet human beings who I would care for and empathize with.
Beyond his gift with language, Tolstoy is a genuis because he could capture History, Fate, War, Tyrants and Slaughter as well as the blessed uniqueness of the indivudual.

Rating:
Summary: "5 stars with a bias"
Review: I can honestly say that this is the best book I've ever read. The bias I have in my opinion is that I read it while I was temporarily living in Germany. I read the book, and then went and visited the places I had just read about. The way James Thackara used real historical events and people, and then wrote his story around it was brilliant. You won't be able to put this one down.