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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
"Murder didn't define Alexander Reisden anymore," the narrator declares coyly on the first page of Sarah Smith's A Citizen of the Country, the final installment of her Vanished Child trilogy. But the truth is that Reisden, former Austrian spy and protective new father, is perpetually haunted by the consequences of having murdered his grandfather at age 8. Set in Paris and Flanders just before the outbreak of World War I, A Citizen of the Country is an intricately plotted, maddeningly complex novel that may frustrate readers who expect mysteries to deliver a corpse before delving into an exploration of motives. In A Citizen of the Country, competing motives are palpable if peculiarly unattached to a definite crime. The first corpse doesn't show up until page 81, for example, but we know intimately many creepy people capable of having poisoned Mlle. Françoise.
"Murder didn't define Alexander Reisden anymore," the narrator declares coyly on the first page of Sarah Smith's A Citizen of the Country, the final installment of her Vanished Child trilogy. But the truth is that Reisden, former Austrian spy and protective new father, is perpetually haunted by the consequences of having murdered his grandfather at age 8. Set in Paris and Flanders just before the outbreak of World War I, A Citizen of the Country is an intricately plotted, maddeningly complex novel that may frustrate readers who expect mysteries to deliver a corpse before delving into an exploration of motives. In A Citizen of the Country, competing motives are palpable if peculiarly unattached to a definite crime. The first corpse doesn't show up until page 81, for example, but we know intimately many creepy people capable of having poisoned Mlle. Françoise.
Though A Citizen of the Country is unconventionally plotted (perhaps overplotted), it nevertheless spins a web of moral dilemmas that seem to trap the main characters between indecision and desire. The characters struggle mightily against the choices that their lives seem to impel them towards, and this is richly rewarding. In a novel brimming with deftly drawn personalities, André de Montfort is the most compelling. Shut in at age 5 with his parents' decomposing corpses during a cholera outbreak, André's personality is subsequently macabre and imbalanced. His alter-ego Necrosar writes and directs a horrifying meditation on Macbeth in which he casts childhood friend Reisden, adoptive father Cyron, and potentially treacherous Sabine, his wealthy, nubile wife. During the filming, which occupies the second half of the novel, a series of unexplained murders flummoxes Reisden, and lures his blind wife Perdita and toddler Toby into frightening proximity to blackmailers, thugs, and sorcerers. The novel's densely involved plots climax in the shocking death of one of the principals, which motivates the best sequence in the novel, a truly terrifying plunge into the claustrophobic, pitch-black tunnels burrowed beneath Arras, an ancient village. A Citizen of the Country amply rewards readers who savor a writhing plot bursting with hundreds of expertly culled historical details. --Kathi Inman Berens
From Publishers Weekly
Set within both the city of Paris and mysterious fictional Montfort Castle in Flanders on the eve of WWI, this stylish and literate historical drama rings down the curtain on Smith's popular trilogy (The Vanished Child; The Knowledge of Water) that illuminates society in early 20th-century France. Dark snatches of memory still trouble Alexander Reisden, director of Jouvet Medical Analyses, an eminent Parisian mental health clinic. Did he murder his grandfather? Is he the heir to an American fortune? As war threatens, Reisden's personal troubles are pushed into the background. On the verge of procuring an important contract with the French army for the mental competency testing of soldiers, he learns that former military hero Maurice Cyron stands in his way. Cyron, who intended a military future for his stepson, Andr?, the count of Montfort, blames Reisden for encouraging Andr?'s theatrical bent. Fascinated by death (for reasons Smith eventually reveals), Andr? channels his dark thoughts into his work at the Grand Necropolitan Theatre, where he is driven to act out his obsessions. Though recently married, he ignores his seductive wife, Sabina, and accuses her of trying to poison him. While struggling to appease Cyron and help Andr?, Reisden strives to satisfy his own wife, Perdita, a legally blind concert pianist who wants to resurrect her career with a trip to America, where she hopes to compel Reisden to come to terms with his past. When Andr? and Cyron join forces to make a military film on the grounds of Montfort Castle in Arras, with Reisden's participation, Smith ratchets up the tension. In addition to providing fascinating background on early filmmaking, the author adds French military secrets, murder, blackmail and witchcraft. Though the buildup to the revelation of Reisden's dilemma seems unnecessarily complicated, readers will care about the splendidly realized characters, whose fates are decided in an eminently satisfying conclusion. Agent, Jane Otte. 3-city author tour.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Citations
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3
books
cite this book:
- The Sunken Sailor (A Serial Novel) by Simon Brett in Back Matter
- The Vanished Child by Sarah Smith in Back Matter
- The Knowledge of Water by Sarah Smith in Back Matter