Kane & Abel

Rating:
Summary: Not exactly the next Steinbbeck
Review: On the same day, on opposite sides of the globe, two boys are born. William Kane is the son of a wealthy Boston banking conglomerate. "Abel" Rosnovski (who takes the name when he immigrates to the United States) is the orphaned child of a Polish peasant. William's life is shaped by wealth, political connections, and an Ivy League education. Abel's will is honed as he escapes Russian imprisonment and fights his way to the United States for a better life. When a banking deal goes awry between William's company and Abel's hotelier employer, Abel is left at the helm of one of the largest hotel chains in the country and face-to-face with his new arch-enemy, William Kane.

An appropriate book coming from an author many Brits describe as a ruthlessly meglomaniacal and corrupt politician. William's father is almost a caricature of selfish evil even while such selfishness is condoned by the book's absence of condemnation of it.

The writing itself is fairly prosaic. The shifts between William's point of view and Abel's is, at times, jarring. Though as we watch the men grow from boys and develop their respective strengths, it becomes eerily difficult to decide whom to root for in the upcoming battle that is pathetically transparent from the beginning.

Archer apparently aspired to be the next Steinbeck and while he fails, he didn't fail that badly.

Rating:
Summary: Old Money - Verses New
Review: Penniless immigrant; or scion of an established family, the American dream is for the taking. Immigrant Abel had faced horrors in his past, but rose to fortune though hard work and seizing of opportunities. William Kane was born to money, but he took his small stakes, coupled with his intelligence, upbringing, and education, made it into a million before he graduated from college. Abel had to make his money well after that.

Part rags to riches, part Romeo and Juliet, all interesting, Kane and Abel document the birth, life, and death of two very different men who are both successes, but also end up destroying each other's greatest dream in a senseless feud born of ignorance.

The saga spans over 60 years, and constrasts Kane's easy life and born duty, with Abel's hard life, and struggle to forge his own destiny. However, the two men are very much more alike than different. Both are driven to win in their own way. In their own way, each lives out his destiny. They also each also destroy the other's ultimate dream in a battle of power and hatred. The irony is that battle never needed to be fought if they both had a little more information.

This also contrasts with another theme of the novel - what could they have achieved by working together as friends instead of enemies? Ulimately, it is not for them to decide, but for their children. Richard is his father's son; Flornentya her father's daughter. Does their love form a bond between their families - or an even greater rift with neither parent willing to admit they might have been wrong?



Rating:
Summary: What are you positive reviewers thinking!?!
Review: This might have been a good story, if the writing wasn't so bad in so many respects. Author Archer served as the youngest member of the House of Commons in England, and no doubt he got his start in writing through this position, rather than by his merits.
The book is an epic story covering the lives of two powerful men from the day in 1906 that they're both born on separate continents, up until they die in the 1960s. Their lives are parallel in some ways; in other ways, they are a study in contrast. William Kane is born into a life of luxury and power, the only son of one of the most powerful banking families in Boston's elite upper society. Wladek Kosciekicz, who later in life changes his name to Abel Rosnovski, starts his life as a foster son to a poor trapper's family in Poland.
Kane goes to Harvard and impresses everyone with his bearing and financial wiles at a young age. Abel discovers he is the son of a Baron, but the Baron dies and Abel is sent to a Russian prison camp after the Baron's castle is invaded by Germans.
Eventually, Kane works his way in as chair of a large banking firm, due in part to his father's name, but mostly because of his own hard work. Abel escapes the labor camp, makes his way to America, and works his way up from a job as a waiter to the owner of a large chain of hotels.
In the course of a financial dealing between the two, Abel grows to hate Kane, and starts a bitter feud that lasts the rest of their lives.
This could be an interesting book, and in some ways it is interesting. The rough young life of Abel is a fascinating story, as is the story of how Kane grows into his family inheritance. A rags to riches story set alongside a riches to more riches story is a good idea, and the backdrop of an emerging America and two World Wars is engaging.
But the book is rife with problems.
First, the poor editing of the book resulted in a rather high number of typos, ranging from wrong-word misspellings to the unintentional repetition of a phrase. This is a minor concern, but when the rest of the book is so shabby, the effect is magnified.
More important is the writing itself, which is filled with on-purposes, rather than mistakes, and that makes them all the worse.
The tone of the book is generally dreadful, and seems to be infected with the some of the same problems as the books of the day-I wonder if Archer, in researching this book, read so much early 20th century literature that his prose picked up the stiffness of a Sherlock Holmes story.
Certainly, he does far more telling than showing, and he does this in the worst way possible. There are so many instances in which dialogue is summed up rather than presented, in which grief and other emotions are spoken of rather than exemplified, and in which character dynamics are mentioned rather than displayed, that at some points the book reads like the bible.
Another problem is the pacing. The book moves through the years with a strange rhythm, sometimes dwelling on the most mundane of months for no apparent reason, and then whipping through Kane's experiences as a soldier on the front of World War 2.
The biggest problem, however, is the overall lack of theme. Archer presents striking parallels between the two men, describing some of their experiences with the very same language. The book is filled with the most bizarre coincidences, as Kane and Abel encounter each other, through random coincidence, three times without either knowing it. Then, their children meet each other and fall in love without knowing each other's identities. It's absurd. But, we can live with these types of coincidences if they serve a greater purpose, and that it the problem. In Irving's "A Prayer for Owen Meany," all of the strange coincidences are presented as the will of God. But here, God is barely mentioned, and there is no strong feeling that fate has brought these two men together for some strange purpose. There is no purpose to their meeting at all. Their hatred for each other is spawned through a misunderstanding on Abel's part, and his obsessive determination to take revenge on Kane is cartoonish and out of character. Again, we could understand if there were some reason the two men are drawn to each other, but Archer has given us nothing of that sort to go on.
The stilted writing wrings no emotion from the hearts of its readers, neither joy nor sorrow. When young Kane sees his best friend killed and his sister raped by soldiers, there is no sense of immediacy or grief. They say that the British have the best-developed sense of humor in the world, but all of the jokes fall flat (such as repeated "isn't-he-cute" descriptions of young William's precocious childhood.
Then there are the little things that just don't make sense. The aforementioned raping results in the victim dying, apparently raped to death without any explanation. A young Kane has been receiving tutoring lessons for months from his father the Baron, but never notices that the Baron has gone blind. A woman meets Kane on the train; he is a fugitive and has been told to tell no one his name. The dialogue is presented word for word, and then she uses his name. How did she know it? I thought it was an insidious plot point, but it turned out to be a dumb oversight.
I have begun to think that it is only a recent phenomenon that readers demand realism from their depiction of professions and realistic situations. This book would undoubtedly fall beneath that standard, as the details of the jobs that Kane and Abel occupy are shown in crude outlines.
Kane is a supposed genius at mathematics, winning the only Harvard scholarship offered in the subject, but then puts this knowledge to no apparent use. It is as if Archer thinks that the theoretical and highly involved mathematics involved with advanced Harvard studies are the most natural academic pursuit for a banker. That's ridiculous. It would be interesting to hear how he applies this knowledge in interesting ways to the practical matters of making finance decisions, but we never get that sense at all.
Meanwhile, in an astoundingly unrealistic scene, Abel makes a journey as a middle-aged man back to Poland, and discovers that his foster mother is still living a miserable existence in the shack in which he grew up. She appears at first to be senile, and doesn't understand that Abel is her foster son from so long ago. He tries to convince her for all of thirty seconds, and then resignedly hands her some money from his pocket and leaves (the omniscient reader sees her use the money for paper to start her fire).
My list of complaints goes on and on, but I will close with the ending of the book. After both men have become estranged from their children due to a marriage between them, they each plan a reunion centered on the fact that Abel's daughter and Kane's son are coming to the east coast. Kane dies moments before they arrive at his house. Abel has a successful reunion, and learns that Kane was actually his benefactor before dying himself. It all seems so purposeless, and the book ends with a grand unveiling of the name of the grandson of the two enemies, William Abel Kane.
Who cares?

* Note: After perusing the reviews on Amazon.com, I was surprised to find that Archer is still a successful author, and even more surprised to find that Kane and Abel received rave reviews from the other readers.


Rating:
Summary: Story for the simple minds
Review: Jeffrey Archer, while he can write an engaging story, does not know enough about history. He lives in the past where he thinks in the colonial age where a small group of people shape the life of the world. This is obvious is the past of England where he grew up but not in the US now. While there still is a elite, its impact on the lives of the common man is diminishing. There is a strong middle class. He is still stuck on Harvard for everything. Well, some of the best Nobel prizes do not come from Harvard and Yale anymore. The US and the world is changing slowly. The privileges of the rich are not the only things that govern the world. There is more to the US than the Ivy league. I would strongly advice people to read authors like Coetzee, who won the Booker twice and the Nobel prize and who graduated from the University of Texas, which is belittled by the author in his sequel, the Prodigal Daughter, which shows how little he knows of the changes in the US. This book is a sham and will never be a classic whereas books like "Life and Times of Michael K" will have a lasting appeal. The reason is that any person can relate to the other book as it is about a simple person caught in the torment of the world and how he faces it. This book is about the elite who are disappearing and people will not able to relate to it in the future as it is about the unimportant past which appeals to a few. The author has not done enough research and he is one of the elite. I guess this is a way for him to relive his past and the frustration he feels about how fast it is disappearing. The present day world is one for those who live and work by their one merit and intelligence regardless of their birth. It is sad that the author does not grasp this and writes about people who can beat the stock market in their teens, predict the crash of 1929, make a million dollars before they graduate from college in 1920s (when a million dollars was worth a lot more than now). I am sure that even an economist like Milton Friedmann cannot predict such a crash. I realize it is a novel, but there has to be a hint of realism. I understand this a novel for the mass market, but people who lap this up must understand the harsh criticism and the total lack of realism that it is based on. The language style is also not special and will probably appeal to anyone who goes to high school. If one reads authors like Nadine Gordimer, a single statement in one of her novels like the Conservationist, "Not everyone is poor enough to afford greatness" would decimate this novel and the author's prose.