The most successful woman in Britain, Jane Haddon is resigned to personal and professional loneliness, divorced for eight years and living during a time of great natural and man-made disasters, in a story that reveals Jane's turbulent past, including a history of doomed romance, heroin addiction, and neglect and abuse.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Is there another writer in the English-speaking world more distinctive and adventurous than John Buchan? A foreign correspondent for the Financial Times, Buchan has in the last 12 years produced A Parish of Rich Women, which contrasted the drug-addled English upper crust and the citizens of war-torn Beirut and which won the Whitbread Prize in 1984, and The Golden Plough, an intricate and puzzling Cold War thriller, as well as two other novels. His latest work is almost too dense and ambitious to summarize: it involves a Wall Street takeover specialist whose devotion to keeping a Glasgow textile mill open reveals some dreadful secrets from her own past. It also involves a bankrupt airline operating commercial flights to Antarctica, a massive oil spill, an encounter with 41,000 penguins, insurance scandals, and the descendant of an 18th-century explorer. All of this is related by a detached first-person narrator who may or may not have any relation to the novel's characters. Buchan's book is romance in the grandest sense.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Buchan, who has won notable literary prizes in England for A Parish of Rich Women and The Golden Plough, is a showy writer who has set himself here a rather difficult task: create a novelettish plot out of the sort of characters who people sex-and-shopping potboilers, yet give the whole a high literary gloss. As he puts it himself, in one of those long asides to the reader, he wanted, among other things, to "bridge the chasm between commerce and literature in our country." What he has produced is a sort of upmarket fairy tale whose princess is Jane Haddon, brought up in direst circumstances, who becomes a millionaire CEO of a mammoth textile company, able to plot elaborate corporate takeovers with a few moments' thought. She was once married to glamorous aristocrat Johnny Bellarmine, who, in the tradition of an illustrious ancestor explorer, gets himself lost in the Antarctic. Another plot line concerns Jane's efforts to rescue an underperforming factory of sentimental value and her resulting conflict with an elderly Communist unionist who tries to blackmail her about her past. Yet another treats her affair with Stephen Cohen, another wealthy manipulator who eats columns of figures for breakfast. All this is set forth in prose of high style but considerable self-consciousness beset with countless references that only upwardly mobile people in Mrs. Thatcher's Britain would be likely to grasp.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An underrated masterpiece,
By Terry Moran (New York, New York USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: High Latitudes: A Romance (Hardcover)
"High Latitudes" was one of the best novels of the 1990s. The prose dazzles. The plot weaves through time like a dream shot through with a thin but unmistakable atmosphere of dread. It is a love story haunted by the passing of a way of life, the death of a class. Buchan has a voice like none other in contemporary fiction. Try this book; it may take some work getting accustomed to Buchan's way of telling his story, but I found it tremendously rewarding.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buchan Challenges His Readers,
By A Customer
This review is from: High Latitudes: A Romance (Hardcover)
Life is so complex when you consider the backgrounds, emotions, cultures, experiences, and motivations of people that the common novel presents a completely false picture when it distills all these things into simple characters. Yes, they are easy to read but also easily forgetable. Like Dostoyevsky, Buchan tries, in a more abbreviated way, to get a handle on the characters in this London (and overseas locales)novel. It moves around a bit but isn't most human interaction choppy and at times inscrutable? I found it interesting to try to piece together and to see what the author was getting at. The characters continued to reveal themselves but this didn't lend itself to increased coherence. People are a mystery and this book was mysteriously interesting. I also had the feeling that the author was writing for himself and not the audience. It was refreshing to try to understand the author rather than be given a feel good cupcake by some happy face author.
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