9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Black Pat" Chartwell - A Hound Of Hell, January 16, 2011
This review is from: Mr. Chartwell: A Novel (Hardcover)
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The new novel MR CHARTWELL is simply remarkable! Author Rebecca Hunt takes an ambitious risk in giving literal life to the depressive states that stalked world leader Winston Churchill throughout his life. He called these depressive episodes his "Black Dog". Writing a novel with such a premise could have been a disaster but Hunt does such a skilled job that the short novel is eye-opening and inspirational
The book takes place over a six day period in the summer of 1964 as Churchill prepared to exit the British Parliament for the final time at the age of eighty-nine. Hunt brings the aged leader and the time and setting vibrantly to life as Churchill again wrestles with his "Black Dog" who in this imagining is a huge talking black canine who calls himself "Black Pat" Chartwell. Black Pat exhibits the more unsavory habits of dogs (such as bone chomping and other messy eating habits) along with a cunning intelligence that leads his victims in to the abyss of depression. In his own words there is a reason he is an animal "a dog with the hunger of a dog and I am compelled by it."
Churchill is not Black Pat's only interest. We are introduced to a pretty young widow named Esther who unwisely rents room in her home to the black beast just when she is at her most vulnerable. Helped by caring friends and a revealing encounter with the great Churchill himself it looks like she will be able to break free of the dark demon.
Many who have depression or other mental issues that impinge on their happiness and productivity will identify with the characters in MR. CHARTWELL. The book is also a helpful allegory for those who love someone with depressive issues and in my favorite scene from the book Churchill's loving wife Clementine confronts Black Pat herself and the reader sees how her years of support helped her husband reach his great successes despite his emotional burdens. MR. CHARTWELL is highly recommended to all intelligent, discriminating readers of literary fiction.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Quirky, charming and ultimately uplifting, December 22, 2010
This review is from: Mr. Chartwell: A Novel (Hardcover)
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Esther Hammerhans has been a widow for two years and is currently a librarian in Westminster. She hides in corners to escape notice and has just taken the brave step of furnishing her dead husband's study to rent to a lodger. The only prospective tenant is an enormous and messy dog named Mr. Chartwell, who offers her an astronomical sum for a short term rental. She objects, but he insists on renting the room, and promptly makes himself (most uncomfortably for her) at home. It turns out that the attraction of Esther's room is that it's only a fifty-minute commute to Chartwell, Winston Churchill's country home. The year is 1964 and Churchill is only a few days from retiring from Parliament.
Black Pat, as Mr. Chartwell is more familiarly known, is quite the humorist and fond of amusing wordplay. He does have a dark side; he's the embodiment of Churchill's lifelong depression--literally his bete noire--and, permanently ensconced in Churchill's life, has designs on Esther's. Esther, suffering from survivor's guilt after her husband's suicide, is a prime target for Black Pat, but Fate takes a hand with a little nudge from her martinet boss at the library and the support of her friends Beth, Oliver and Corkbowl as well as an intervention from the Great Man himself. Esther is required to go to Chartwell to transcribe Churchill's retirement speech. Esther's little group of champions rallies round to steel her for the ordeal and what transpires is an absolute delight. This is a book that begins with an unlikely premise and some doubt as to whether or not Ms. Hunt can pull it off, but ends with the realization that this is an unusually lovely story with a perfect ending.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
If Life's a Bitch, Depression's a Dog, February 3, 2011
This review is from: Mr. Chartwell: A Novel (Hardcover)
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Give Rebecca Hunt a solid B+ for her vivid imagination. She's created a full length novel using, as the simplest of starting points, Sir Winston Churchill's description of his depression as a "black dog." It's a whimsical tale, short on plot, long on character, the most dynamic of which is the titular "Mr. Chartwell," Churchill's dark companion made actual. He's six foot seven, a "strikingly hideous Labrador" with dense black fur and a "broad face split by a vulgar mouth." Mr. Chartwell comes into the lives of the novel's characters (including the former British PM), causing anguish, destruction and anxiety. Lassie he ain't.
Meant to be "enchanting...charismatic, sinister, yet seductive" (all according to the folks at Random House), Mr. Chartwell is instead thuggish, vulgar, manipulative and remarkably unpleasant company. In other words, depression personafied. So, at the same time that Hunt is successful in giving corporeal weight to an emotion, she hasn't created a character I want to spend much time with. Nor does anyone else in the story, for that matter. And I can't say I warmed to the book's theoretical heroine, Esther, a mousy, damaged young widow whose conflicts with Mr. Chartwell form the novel's core.
Personally, I just don't think Hunt is a good enough writer to pull off the sleight of hand she's attempting here. Chief among her faults is complete and utter adoration of her own style, with which she continually pummels the reader. Take the book's first page, which contains a staggering five --count `em, five -- metaphors in as many lines: "Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill's mouth was pursed as if he had a slice of lemon hidden in there...Grey dawn appeared in a crack between the curtains, amassing the strength to invade. Churchill prepared himself for the day ahead, his mind putting out analytical fingers and then coming at the day in a fist, ready for it. A view of the Weald of Kent stretched beyond the window, lying under an animal skin of mist." Perhaps not everyone will find this over-written, but I find it dreadfully so. Moving forward, it often seems as if Ms. Hunt has written with a thesaurus at hand for the sole purpose of expressing her thoughts in the most arcane, awkward way possible.
Some examples:
"Thoughts of Mr. Chartwell...were a wound which wanted its bandages quietly lifted to assess, stomach in flight, what lay underneath." Stomach in what? Whose stomach? The thought was a wound and the wound has a stomach?
"For a long time the weeks of her life had drifted past as ghosts. There was a rare bump of pleasure, perhaps from a meal out or a visit to the cinema, but it was brittle and shattered under the lonely monotony of the ghost days." A brittle bump of pleasure? What does that mean, isn't there a simpler way of expressing this?
"The dresser was more than a storage place for holiday trophies; it was a strategic device for forcing good memories to the lid of the mind, a raft in a sea of empty grief." Metaphor piled upon metaphor, each one more labored than the next.
"[Mr. Chantwell's] instincts sent out frequencies and recorded specks of phosphorescence in the blank screen of Esther's deliberation." Come on now, is that even English?
"Beth rolled her eyes, used to [Dennis-John's] insults. They came in a salad of venom and mad exaggeration..." Salad, really? Meaning what exactly? If there's a clearer way of saying this, why doesn't Hunt do so?
"Thoughts of Michael tunneled through the rubble burial of the past two years. They emerged at a better time, at the times before, at one particular time not far before..." The woman's remembering her dead husband, can't Hunt simply say this?
"She slowed to skim her coffee to a manageable level, then sped up, heading to a table in the...staff canteen." Skim her coffee? With what? Of what? What does skimming coffee mean, actually? Is this something lost in trans-Atlantic translation?
"A feeling in Esther rocked on its base and threatened to spill." Does Hunt mean spill over? And if the feeling is solid enough to have a base, what part of it is liquid enough to spill over?
I know I'm sounding remarkably picayune, but page after page finds Hunt mangling the English language, twisting her words and ideas into poetical nonsense; as she might say, a salad of bad metaphors and obtuse expressions.
And are we really to believe that Esther, a librarian in the House of Commons, for goodness sake, has never heard of "Tess of the D'Urbervilles?" Hiring standards in Parliament must be very low, indeed.
Ultimately -- as is abundantly clear -- "Mr. Chartwell" failed to engage me on most levels. I liked the idea of the novel, but felt that Hunt undermined the emotions of her story by constantly drawing attention to the presumed cleverness of the writing. For a book that deals with the deepest of emotions, I felt only cold disinterest.
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