Rating: 
Summary: Rose
Review: Martin Cruz Smith finds a new land of intrigue with Rose, that of a coal-mining town in 1872 England. Jonathan Blair, a mining engineer brought from the Gold Coast of Africa back to the town of his birth, Wigan, by his patron, the Bishop Hannay, is charged with the task of determining the whereabouts, dead or alive, of a missing Curate, John Maypole, who was engaged to be married to the Bishop's daughter. Blair encounters many mysteries in his search, the most intriguing being Rose, a 'pit-girl' who is every bit the fascination to him that she was to Maypole. Rose teases Blair with tidbits of information regarding the life Maypole led in Wigan, as do many other of the town's inhabitants, leading Blair to believe there is a deeper meaning to his presence in Wigan than merely finding Maypole's whereabouts. Deftly displaying Blair's aptitude in the workings of a coal mine, as well as his shortcomings as a detective, Martin Cruz Smith weaves an intriguing tale, as Blair encounters mystery after mystery leading him to brawls with local miners, roadblocks at every turn in his search, and brief physical liaisons with Rose before the answers to his question are found.
Rating: 
Summary: Location and plot twist rescue a lackluster storyline.
Review: (3½ stars actually, but not 4. I do wish Amazon would adopt a more flexible rating system!) In ROSE, it is 1872. Jonathan Blair, a down-on-his-luck explorer/mining engineer/surveyor, is sick with malaria in miasmic, damp London. His only desire is to return to his beloved Africa. To that end, he approaches his sponsor on a previous surveying expedition to the African Gold Coast, Bishop Hannay, and pleads for renewed employment. Hannay agrees, on the condition that Blair first visit the bleak coal mining town of Wigan in the English county of Lancashire to investigate the disappearance of the local Anglican curate, one John Maypole. (Here, I must briefly digress. Bishop Hannay is also Lord Hannay, the family head of a huge industrial empire that manufactures everything from bricks to locomotives, and owns the principal mine in Wigan, itself a Hannay company town. I'm not sure why the author, Martin Cruz Smith, bothered to make Hannay a bishop, since no reference is ever made to his episcopal see, cathedral, or duties.) In any case, Blair reluctantly accepts the task. In Wigan, he encounters mysterious deaths, local thugs, the rest of Hannay's dysfunctional family, and the enigmatic "pit girl" Rose Molyneux. Our hero soon discovers that the missing Maypole, though engaged to Hannay's cold and waspish daughter Charlotte, had become amorously obsessed with Rose, a passion eventually shared by Blair, and which complicates his life enormously. If the plot of this potboiler had taken place in a contemporary time in, say, New York or Los Angeles, or even rural Appalachia, it would not have gotten off the ground. The action tends to plod. What saves it, in this case, is the period and location. I trust Smith researched the environment of 19th century, English coal towns and mines before undertaking this novel. Inasmuch as his research is presumably accurate, the local color is instructional and interesting. Moreover, there is an unexpected plot twist at the end when Blair discovers Rose to be ... well, you'll find out when you read it. And, if you come to harbor any sympathy for Blair whatsoever, the very last sentence of the tale is particularly satisfying.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: A haunted explorer dragged against his will back from nineteenth century Africa to search for a missing young priest in English coal country. Anti-hero Jonathan Blair is of a piece with Cruz Smith's better known protagonist, Moscow detective Arkady Renko. Both are self-effacing, lonely, ironic, funny in a shambling sort of way. It's as though Blair wanted to deploy Renko in a different milieu and realized he needed to change his name and accent. Blair is only one of two major characters. The other is the coal mine: the Hannay deep pit mine, black and hot, without pity, but full of life and death. Martin Cruz Smith took a break from the Renko series, but he can still write amazing stories.
Rating:
Summary: Worthy of Fitzgerald and Hawthorne
Review: Rose takes place in an English coal-mining town during the late 19th century, and tells the story of Blair, an African explorer who has run out of health and money. To get back to his beloved Africa, he is given the charge of finding out what happened to John Maypole, a curate who was engaged to the daughter of his sponsor-the wealthy Bishop Hannay-and who disappeared one day leaving no clues behind. Two things struck me while reading this book. First was the quality of Smith's prose. Repeatedly I found myself thinking, "If Fitzgerald and Hawthorne sat down together to write a mystery, this is what they would write". The book is full of metaphors, most obvious being the coal mine painted as hell, and the town itself (Wigan), an awkward purgatory. Second, Smith's ability to take us to that place and time was remarkable. The amount of research required to write a novel set in a different time and place is daunting, and to be able to collate that research into a well structured story is nearly unfathomable. I saw the town, smelled it, felt the brass tipped clogs crashing into my shin, my ribs when the miners fought. The ending, too, is satisfying, especially as it is unconventional. Don't expect to gasp like you may have when the secret of Scott Turrow's Presumed Innocent was revealed, or when Bruce Willis' character in The Sixth Sense made his revelation, but keep an open eye
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, engrossing, beautifully written
Review: After being blown away by the Akardy Renko trilogy, especially the brilliant final chapter, "Red Square," I had high hopes and anticipation for Smith's next novel. What a huge surprise! Pit girls in a turn of the century English coal mining town? Who would have thought one of the finest and certainly most entertaining novels of 1996 would emerge from this premise? Smith is such a brilliant writer, as I write this, over a year and a half after reading the hardcover, I can still clearly visualize the town of Wigan. His grasp of mise en scene is incredible. A historical novel/mystery like this succeeds or fails on the quality of the world the author creates. I believe Smith more than succeeded. In addition, his characters are sharply drawn and memorable and, as usual, he has created a wonderfully strong and independent female character in Rose. What a movie this could make. Memo to Masterpiece Theatre: A six-hour adaption would be greatly appreciated. As I recall, this book sold about five copies, which is just tragic. Read it, you'll have a great experience!
Rating:
Summary: A spellbinding, atmospheric novel of Welsh coal mines
Review: A departure from his excellent Russian novels (Gorky Park, Polar Star, Red Square), 'Rose' is set in Victorian England in the coal mining village of Wigan.
Sentence by sentence, this is a book to savor - gritty and graceful, dark and witty, brutal and bracing. Ostensibly a detective story, the plot is seamlessly integrated with character, place and time - so perfectly that myriad details will only be recognized as clues in delighted retrospect. But the plot recedes behind its protagonist, Jonathan Blair. Blair himself has little interest in his mission - the search for a missing curate - forced upon him by his patron, Bishop Hannay, worldly churchman, aristocrat and owner of the Wigan coal mines. Blair's drive is his desire to return to Africa and his Anglo-African daughter. A mining engineer hired to map gold country in Africa, Blair was yanked in disgrace after he appropriated church funds to pay his workers. Expedition leaders were expected to make up a shortfall of funds from their own pockets but Blair, no gentleman, possesses no private income. An American by upbringing, Blair was born in Wigan. His father was unknown and his mother was buried at sea on the journey to America, leaving him in the care of an American mining engineer named Blair. A small child at the time, Blair recalls no other name. Bishop Hannay has promised him Africa in return for finding John Maypole, the zealous curate who was engaged to Hannay's ascerbic daughter Charlotte. Not until he arrives in Wigan does Blair discover that Maypole disappeared on the same day 76 men were killed in a mine explosion of mysterious origin. Blair's hatred of things British, particularly the aristocracy and the grueling fates of laborers, brings an aura of dread and reluctance to all his encounters and descriptions. His soul imbues his observations with beauty, as when he arranges to go into the mine: "In dark fields on either side Blair could make out miners in the dark by the glow of their pipes and the mist of their breath. The fields smelled of manure, the air of ash. Ahead, from a high chimney, issued a silvery column of smoke that at its very peak was colored by dawn." Miners descend before daylight, ascend after sunset, spending their day a mile below the surface. Seen through Blair's observant eyes the mine is riveting, claustrophobic and tense. There are so many ways to die down there. Blair pursues his investigation among the pit girls (the scandal of Britain in their pants and freedom) becoming fascinated by one, Rose, whose effect on the curate may have lead to his death. His dogged if unwilling persistence crosses nearly everyone in a town rife with secrets, and brutal in defending them. Blair insinuates himself into miners' lives, the do-gooder activities of Charlotte and her naive curate, the maneuvering of mine owners. He explores abandoned tunnels, and pokes around in the rubble of the explosion. A fight with Rose's beau, a man who excels in a form of kick-boxing in clogs fitted with brass studs, nearly ends in his death. All of these activities lead him closer to the curate's fate but more important, they pull the reader into a world completely alien, involve us in its sensations and smells, longings and loves, dirt and danger. This is a book to read slowly, for the tactile beauty of its prose and the power of the world it evokes.
Rating: 
Summary: A Worthy Try
Review: In nineteenth-century England, the American explorer, Blair, is employed by a bishop to investigate the disappearance of a curate in the mining town of Wigan. Reluctantly Blair agrees and begins his detective work half-heartedly, but his interest in the disappearance of the curate is stimulated by the presence in the town of Rose Molyneux, a pit-girl. Was the disappearance of the curate connected with a recent mining disaster, and why is the mining community so tight-lipped about the events? "Rose" is a good attempt at an historical thriller, with much going for it. The author does a decent job in describing industrial England and the perils of mining. He conveys an atmosphere of danger, dirt and despair. He also manages to catch the cadences of northern English dialect. But I've found with many mystery novels that the ending can't quite match the build-up. I thought that "Rose" was no exception to that. Not to spoil the ending for other readers, but it depends so much upon a highly unlikely scenario that I couldn't help feeling somewhat let down. But perhaps the entertainment was in the journey rather than at the point of arrival... G Rodgers
Rating:
Summary: Cinematic
Review: Cruz Smith has a gift for developing a setting- several settings- into the weave of a tale. In `Rose', a sooty, Victorian mystery, the author unfavorably casts the British imperialists against the Ashanti, Gold Coast civilizations where the hero, had earned the name, "Nigger Blair." The disparate lifestyles, coal miner and upper classes, share the same dark, damp Northern English sky and exist entwined in a subterranean and eternal state of dependency. The customs of the times, especially the manner of treating women, and the conditions of the mills and mines for the working poor, are worth the read for their precise, nasty tale of European exploitation. The hero is that sort of flawed, sensual character, rootless, his life a mystery of its own and enormously appealing for his imperfections.
This would make a good movie, (yet I'm told it became a bad one,) it is visual as well as historically full- and the story itself keeps the pace alive.
Rating:
Summary: Plot falls apart on a defective hinge
Review: Despite the top-notch thriller writing and the Caleb Carr-esque detailed setting, "Rose" falls apart on two essential things: one, the solution to the mystery is obvious almost from the moment Blair arrives in town, and two, the plot hinges on an identity question almost as ridiculous as Clark Kent and Superman, that puts Blair in the Lois Lane role. The plot moves quickly and there's plenty of action, but seasoned mystery readers will be way ahead of the author.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating setting for a fine mystery
Review: Jonathan Blair, a mining engineer, agrees to investigate a disappearence in a gritty mining town in order to earn passage back to the Africa that he loves. He encounters a number of interesting and mysterious characters, including the Rose of the title, whose secret provides a pleasant surprise. Martin Cruz Smith appears to have done his homework well; the evocation of the setting is well-done and there is a lot of fascinating information about mining in Victorian England. Perhaps it is not fair to criticize one book by saying that it is not as good as another, but I was a bit disappointed because of the very high standard Smith set for himself with his series about Russian detective Arkady Renko. "Rose" does not quite rise to that level.
|
