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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
American precursor,
By Shady Ave Reader (Arlington, VA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Prisons: Book I of the Beulah Quintet (Beulah Quintet/Mary Lee Settle, Bk 1) (Paperback)
This is a book slight in pages, but powerful in impact, about a foot soldier in Cromwell's New Model Army during the English Civil War in the 17th century. The story centers on an idealistic young soldier and his compatriots who join Cromwell's army to overthrow the King and establish a new order. Their hopes are gradually crushed, however, as Cromwell abandons any path towards radical change. Ultimately Cromwell and his cronies turn on these same men whose idealism is now seen as a threat.The language is vivid, authentic, and the story is both informative and thought provoking. It effectively uses the perspective of the common man to frame historical events that otherwise can seem quite bloodless. The ideals of these doomed young soldiers, such as those which the main character in the book holds, would later take root in America and eventually lead to more fundamental change. Hence this book's connection to the rest of the books in the Beulah Quintet that are set in America. While it is called the first of the Beulah Quintet, Prisons is a pre-quel having been written 17 years after the first book published in the series, O Beulah Land. I find it difficult to believe this is the first review for this book on Amazon, considering the author won the National Book Award for Blood Ties, and she was the founder of the PEN/Faulkner Awards. One can read from many other sources that the Beulah Quintet is considered a landmark of 20th Century American fiction. This book is an essential backdrop against which the other novels in the Quintet are set. While Prisons may not be the best of the Quintet, it is still highly recommended.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Better Than I Hoped,
By
This review is from: Prisons: Book I of the Beulah Quintet (Beulah Quintet/Mary Lee Settle, Bk 1) (Paperback)
Shady Ave Reader provided an excellent review of this book, and it should also be read. I consciously seek to avoid repeating what is there to focus instead on my perspective on it as a reader. I will say one thing in particular about my reaction to that review:If this is truly not the best book in the series, I definitely get to look forward to some top-notch reading. That said: I'm normally very skeptical of historical fiction, because half of the genre is dominated by pretentious stuffed shirts who know their history well and have a snooze-inducing narrative voice, while the other half is populated by people who know next to nothing about history at all and appear determined to display that ignorance proudly with little time spent constructing a story. I also tend to be suspicious of any series of novels longer than three books because that is usually a pretty good sign the author's just writing whatever crap will sell without regard to crafting a quality story. Even worse, I tend to be profoundly reticent to invest any time in a story that crosses generations. There are exceptions to each of these cases where the trend is that I find only poorly written pablum, but to combine all three served to make me put off reading this book for a full year. Last Christmas, several of us gathered around the tree gave each other used books for Christmas. The idea is to help each other broaden our reading horizons so we don't fall into reading ruts, and we try new things. Prisons was one of the books I got. After struggling halfway through DH Lawrence's purple novel of spite and dull melodrama, Women In Love, before giving up on it, I was not motivated to touch Prisons. Finally, after this year's Christmas gathering was put on hold for weather, I decided to try reading Prisons before our delayed gathering. I'm glad I did. Early on I became even more skeptical of my likely enjoyment of the book, because the first half of it heavily uses a literary technique that is usually terribly abused and does nothing for a story: flashbacks. In fact, at first, the entire story was taking place in flashbacks. I was, however, slightly encouraged by the authenticity of the "present" events that framed the flashbacks -- the plodding life of a soldier on the road, strikingly familiar to me as an ex-soldier myself. A bit more encouragement came in the form of the evocative tone of the flashback text, the depth of characters, and eventually the way all the various threads started to come together to be woven into a well-crafted first-person narrative. The fact it unapologetically makes use of a first-person perspective inside the character's head rather than tritely justifying by way of letters or journal entries the way lesser period novels such as The Illusionist did helped keep it from foundering as well. By the time I was halfway through this book, I had realized I was reading something quite remarkable in its craftsmanship. I don't want to go into details of the story, but it is moving, comprehensive in its attention to the salient details of the story and its protagonist's life, and deeply philosophical without preaching or falling into self-conscious pretensions. Even the villains of the piece are thoroughly humanized in shocking clarity, in some cases long before there is any hint of their antagonistic place in the plot. One might be tempted to assign a moral to the story, identifying it as a parable illustrating any of half a dozen or so oft-repeated cliches that we've all heard -- "power corrupts", for instance -- but doing so will only lend a superficial character to the story that it doesn't deserve. Take it as it comes, rather than trying to impose your own sense of what it is, or should be, about. Find out what it means for you after you have read the thing and it has time to sink in. Then, like me, push it on your friends and relatives, because it's an excellent book, and my only complaint is to myself for waiting so long to read it.
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