Customer Reviews

Henry James' Midnight Song

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I wasn't too sure what to expect when I picked up this book at a friend's recommendation. Not having been a Henry James fan, the title simply turned me off. As soon as I'd finished the first two pages, I knew I wasn't going to be able to put this book down without some sort of physical threat to my well-being. Aside from being an exquisitly written novel, it's filled with factual information and characters, social commentary (as applicable to our time as to turn of the century Vienna,) and truely haunting suspense. Plus, it's a bit difficult these days to find a book with truely likeable characters. Hill creates colorful portraits of sometimes bleak historical figures (i.e. Sigmund Freud, Edith Wharton, Carl Jung, and of course Mr. James) with a fabulous array of (possibly) fictional characters that you can't help but feel admiration, adoration, and/or sympathy for. Hill's range of styles and points of view are wonderfully displayed in this fine work that you could read again and again, learning something new everytime.

This is an amazing fictional exploration of a very explosive, talented, and contradictory era and place. That is Vienna, Austria at the turn of the century. Hanging over this whole novel is the question of how a city of beauty and imagination could have also been a hotbed of rampant and violent anti-semitism. But what truly sets this novel apart is its brilliant re-creation of the figures of this age: Henry James as a secret reader of potboilers; Edith Wharton the secret writer of pornography; Carl Jung's indiscretions with female patients; and Sigmund Freud's early failures. The author Hill, is at the top of her game though in inverting the Freudian theories of "female hysteria" and the women characters are strong and appealinq.

This book takes you in and interweaves you inside a complex mystery in which no one will ever really know the truth. Questions our notion of mastery and delivers the unexpected. Read this!

For the first couple hundred pages, HJMS was completely engrossing. Had (rhetorically speaking) the story ground to the same conclusion that it eventually reached, I would have given it 4 stars (shy of a 5th for an overall weak ending). As it stands, the novel plods along for an additional two hundred pages in which further character development is minimal and the underlying 'murder mystery' barely progresses. As a historical novel (set in fin-de-siecle Vienna, and featuring, among other notables, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Edith Wharton, and Henry James) HJMS is a decent effort. De Chellis Hill writes well, and she has clearly read a great deal of literature from the period and secondary history about it. Though it does convey some flavor of the times and personages, however, HJMS feels rather superficial, more like a skilled creative writing exercise (at the hands, one must concede, of a very capable writer) than a work of particular historical or psychological depth. As an introduction to Freud, Jung, Wharton, and James, HJMS is pretty shallow stuff. But then, HJMS is a work of fiction. What makes it a rather disappointing work of fiction, in the end, is the fact that the 'murder mystery' at its core is so uncompellingly developed and so anticlimactically resolved (or not, as the case may be). A 445 page read merited a much better ending. HJMS had the makings of a very good novel. In the end, I found it a bit tiresome.

Black horses gallop through the streets of Vienna in the dark of night.

The Countess Bettina Von Gerzl proclaims "I do not want to lead a tragic life."

A young girl yearns to be portrayed in a Henry James novel.

A body is discovered in and then goes missing from Freud's sitting room. Could it be Hysteria?

Black horses gallop in the dead of night.

Edith Wharton takes a journalist as a lover.

Carl Jung takes a patient as a lover.

Henry James strangles his cat?

[clip clop; clip clop; clip clop; CLIP CLOP]

Emperor Franz Josef broods about why the women of Vienna seem to be killing themselves. Murder? One? Twelve?

Galloping black horses. Deceit. Vengeance. Scandal.

"We are not who we pretend to be."

"Oh I AM someone. I am. I AM someone."

Fin-de-siecle