Customer Reviews

Refiner's Fire

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is the best Fiction I have read in English since I read the translation of Milan Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being". The beauty of the language is such that it would not be surprising if one required grief counseling after completing this book. The experience and beauty gained in the reading, is mourned soon after you have turned the last page and a feeling of loss descends upon you. Though the book is not sad. Completing it is. It is alive with the joy of lively and interesting characters who take you with them in their dreams and hopes for the future. It is only this that one loses by turning the last page. Intellectually a stimulating story and linguistically one of the best examples of how English should be written with an appreciation of the natural poetic imagery of the language.

I started life reading all of the works of William Faulkner -- The best American writer of the 20th Century. Richard Powers is obviously a genius and a great writer. Don Dillio, John Irving, and especially Wallace Stegner are all great writers. But Mark Helprin is a true genius with language. After reading four of Mark Helprin's books, he comes closest to the magic writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, except I end up caring a gread deal more about his characters. "Winter's Tale" is remarkable. Just the language in "A Soldier of the Great War"; and "Memoir from Antproof Case" are worth reading. The brillance of the later works are evident in "Refiner's Fire".

If you do, you will deprive yourself of one of the joy's of reading this book. While endings typically conclude, surprise, or leave questions, Refiner's Fire does so much more: It affirms life. Read the book, page by page, and let the story carry you away. Then, as the pages remaining become thinner and thinner you will race to finish -- but you must not. Allow it to unfold and experience one of the most joyful and moving books ever. Just terrific

I really, really wanted to like this book. As a notorious non-liberal -- an extreme rarity among modern fiction writers -- Helprin stands outside the cant and blather of much of what gets praised today. As a proud Jew and a Zionist, he is even more of a pariah. "Refiner's Fire," among other things, is very clearly an answer to the neurotic, sniveling, physically weak and incompetent image of the American Jew as perpetrated by Philip Roth, Woody Allen, Saul Bellow and others; Helprin's protagonist, Marshall Pearl, rides, shoots, and swaggers with the best of 'em. I tend to agree with Helprin's politics and attitudes. However ...
However, it is impossible to love perfection, and Marshall Pearl is perfect. He is tall. He is handsome. He is apparently irresistible to women and never, never has a heartache of any kind. He is filthy rich. He is almost abnormally neat and clean. He is brilliant, entering Harvard with, as far as I can see, approximately nine years of schooling and nothing like an SAT or a recommendation. He is a cartoon action hero, whose risks always pay off, whose self-consciously picaresque adventures invariably end in triumph. Almost none of the novel's hundreds of events are even remotely believable, nor is the writing sufficiently surreal to succeed as fantasy. This is a terrible waste, and a shame.
There is no growth, no change, not even the most rudimentary kind of development open to this character. Like Athena, he springs essentially full-grown from his creator's head, and then does -- what, exactly? Who cares? This isn't a novel -- it's an anti-sixties polemic in the guise of a novel. If Helprin wants to hate his generation, that's his problem (talk about neurotic!) -- if I want to read a novel which is pro-Israel and pro-America, I still want to read a novel. I want plot, suspense, surprise, development: none of which are to be found here.
It really is too bad, because the man can write like nobody's business. We cannot divorce ourselves from our times, no matter how much we may want to need that separation.

Mark Helprin's "Refiner's Fire" is one of the most original fictional books I have ever read. Written in a whimsical, almost magical, style, the book begins with the main character, Marshall Pearl, ailing in a Haifa Hospital, gravely wounded from an artillery shell fired near Mount Hermon in the opening salvo of the Yom Kippur War. From there, the book tells the story of his life, from being born an orphan on a refugee ship in Palestine to fighting Rastas in Jamaica and searching for the story of his father amidst the frozen crevices of Mount Chamonix.

While adventuring through the world, Marshall goes through tests small and large, each of which will help make him into a man. Although the reader begins the book knowing that there will be some point at which Marshall goes through the refiner's fire, Helprin makes the story up to that moment both full and complex. Rather than just letting the big events do the shaping, Helprin shows how a person like Marshall, naturally brave and independent, can be tested in all sorts of ways, knowingly and unknowingly, and then draw upon the results of those tests for when it really counts.

The book demands the attention of the reader and, if it is given, the reader is rewarded with a lovely, intricate tale replete with beautiful language and thoughtful observations. For instance, while in the hills of the West Bank, Helprin observes that, "It was easy to die near Jerusalem, as easy as falling in the undertow of a history which surged in tides and currents and was unknown, but left its marks like wind eroding the rock. All things conspired there on a high part of the stage upon which they had come at their risk."

At the same time, however, although the majority of the book was involving, there were stretches in which the writing was a little too dream-like and detached, a bit distracting from the plot. Had the book contained fewer cluttered sentences and focused more on the difficulties and trials that cause "steel and gold and silver [to] spring from the previously soft souls of the tried," I believe it would have been an even stronger effort.

Still, the book is a great achievement and its sometimes-crowded and reaching sentences can be overlooked in a story of great beauty, told by a dazzling writer. Highly recommended.

A wonderful novel, typical of the author, that sprawls across the last century from Czarist Russia to the founding of Israel to the Hudson Valley to Rastafrian Jamaica...and so on. The story, while bordering on the absurd at times, will keep you cemented to your reading chair, and the ending is perfect, a complete validation of the novel's central premise: life is beautiful.

I'm sorry for the guy disappointed by the book. I must have gone through six or seven copies of RF in my 20/30s - a good book to give to friends and, as some of the other part-time critics here have written, a very life affirming book.

It seems to combine the best of the wonderful chaotic rush that life in adolescence can give you, when you're doing everything for the first of times; with the other pleasures - of age, now - of looking back on the past and realising personal time then is now becoming part of history.

Helprin catches that cusp dead on, naturally without pretentious artifice.

I'm a Brit, Welsh by background, and RF has an age-spanning resonance for me with 'Oh Lucky Man', a film made in 1974, directed by Lindsay Anderson, a 'new realism' Brit, socialist/surrealist theatre director. He's also famous for 'This Sporting Life' and 'If' - which is about English public schoolboys rebelling (I've just remembered the recent US school massacre and made the connection)and taking the guns from the school OTC armoury and attacking the parents and teachers as they come out from a memorial ceremony.

That was made in 1970, so I don't think the lawyers can class it as an influential video nasty.

'Oh Lucky Man' is a modern equivalent of a Mystery Play. Young Man is tempted, learns, becomes wiser in different ways, and then is plucked from the crowd to star in 'Oh Lucky Man'.

A similar focus on the intensity of experience of life with Helprin, but of 'American' as both immigrant and explorer - but a stranger always in his adopted lands - the subtitle of the book is, I seem to remember: Marshall Pearl, The Adventures of a Foudling.

Which, when you think about it, is actually a fairly Dickensian/middle Victorian sort of subtitle ?

Some keys are maybe there ? In RF, Helprin has created a Dickensian kind of sprawl of characterisation - though not as caricatured as Dickens; a span of history and class; and a hero with a self-creating will and destiny who keeps getting caught up in history.

Read this book !

P.S. Also read Alan Garner's collection of Essays

Having read "Soldier of the Great War", I was disappointed in this novel. "Soldier" was superb! I found myself suspecting that this was an earlier work, perhaps his first novel (which it is). It is broad in scope and bold in vision, but too often the use of language is pretentious and obscure. There is some excellent writing, which previews what is to come in "Soldier". But "Refiner's Fire" lacks the control and the consistent elegance that I had expected and which one finds in his later work. This book is an interesting read for one who enjoys observing the development and maturation of a great writer.

I think this book should be in the fantasy section rather than the literature section of your local bookstore. Helprin's use of the English language is spectacular - but most of the book is simply one unbelievable event after the other without any sort of plot. It simply is a description, magnificently written, of a fantastic voyage through hurricanes, frozen mountains, slaughterhouses and Jamaican jungle. The beginning and end of the book are great - the middle borders on silly.

Helprin tells a story of grand scope and vision. A single lifetime that goes from foundling to Admiral and covers the globe. Helprin's ability to make believable the most fantastic of situations is unparalled. A book worthy of several reads.