Blind Love

Rating:
Summary: Only for diehard Wilkie Collins fans
Review: This book is definitely not another Woman in White or The Moonstone, both wonderfully well-written mysteries. For those who absolutely have to read every word that Collins wrote, this book is recommended. The plot is fairly boring and the characters fairly uninteresting. Overall, a slow and somewhat dull read.

Rating:
Summary: Only for diehard Wilkie Collins fans
Review: This book is definitely not another Woman in White or The Moonstone, both wonderfully well-written mysteries. For those who absolutely have to read every word that Collins wrote, this book is recommended. The plot is fairly boring and the characters fairly uninteresting. Overall, a slow and somewhat dull read.

Rating:
Summary: Eyes blinded by love may open on delusion
Review: This last of Wilkie Collins' novels is far more readable than one might suppose, given the relatively mediocre quality of his late work. Readers should be warned not to expect the same high level of intricate villainy, mystery, and subtle plotting that distinguished Collins' earlier, more famous books, and they will also have benignly to overlook some unnecessarily heavy-handed narrative intrusions from the author and his absurd harping on differences between the Celtic and Saxon temperaments (to the detriment of the former). But "Blind Love" is lively and full of incident, the heroine's predicament touches on serious moral issues, and the core events in the story are told with drama and zest. A young lady named Iris Henley defies friends and family to marry the ne'er-do-well scion of an Irish noble house, Lord Harry Norland, to whom she is irresistibly attracted (the "blind love" of the title). Charming, handsome, and reckless, Harry is not really a bad sort at heart, but he lacks the backbone to make something of himself, is prone to rash action and to running through money, and finds it far too easy to grasp at any expedient if his back is to the wall. When the married couple's financial resources start to grow slim in Paris, Harry lets himself be tempted to a series of criminal acts by his unscrupulous associate Dr. Vimpany, who has conceived a nefarious plan for filling their coffers once more. Out of loyalty to her husband, but ignorant of the true nature of his deeds, Iris yields to Harry's persuasion and becomes his reluctant accomplice in the final stage of Vimpany's plot, the commission of an insurance fraud. But remorse quickly burdens her tender conscience and the happiness of the marriage is irrevocably destroyed. To say more would be to spoil what small surprises lie in store for the reader. In "Blind Love" suspense arises not from the need to unavel what took place, and how, but from the interaction between the characters. The first third of the novel is marred by the almost comic implausibility of the scenes between Harry and Iris, who is vainly striving to resist her natural impulse to fling herself into his arms, whereas the conclusion is flawed by the summary, just-winding-up-the-plot retribution meted out to the evil-doers and Iris' foregone consignment to a staid new marriage with her formerly rejected suitor, the patient and unwavering Hugh Montjoy. But the central portion of this novel, where Collins probes the Norland menage and its tell-tale tensions, and then implacably details the criminal scheme, is as absorbing as any Collins admirer could desire.