Art Historians Books

The two main characters, Flavia and Argyll, did not seem to progress from the earlier book and actually seemed somewhat flat. Too much of the book was driven by Flavia's boss's bureaucratic battles and intrigues. The plot was okay, a bit hokey.

Still, the cultural setting was very good and lifted the book from mere ordinariness.

Although not as good as the first in the series, I will read some more...I think the potential is still there and I still want to like the two main characters as much as I did in the first book. Besides, the art world scene as portrayed is interesting enough to bring me back. Also Pears writing is good. All in all, this was an amusing fairly light read.

Now for the book itself. Giotto's Hand is a decent mystery in the tradition of the other books in the series, weaving intrigue and introducing various twists well. However, there are a few faults with the book. Firstly, as it is not set in Italy for the most part, the Italian charm and flair that distinguishes the other books is not present. Secondly, the first 100 or so pages of the book are fairly hard-going and difficult to get into: I only really got into this book when I forced myself to sit down and reading it; the best mysteries force me to do so themselves.

Thirdly, it is rather cliched in the way it presents one solution at the end which seems to be the clever conclusion, scraps it promptly replacing it with another (this is a good twist), and then goes to far by scrapping this too an introducing a third as the final truth. Additionally, while we all know Argyll is a moral sort of guy, it's taken a bit far with the decision he makes at the end of the book.

Overall, still worth a read, but probably the least good in a well above-average series.

Joanna Trollope clearly saw Charleston in terms of its inhabitants' English roots--the furniture, the holiday celebrations, etc. That's all fine--*but they don't see themselves that way.* No Americans do, not even Anglophiles. I can imagine polite Southerners pointing out similarities to an English guest. Apparently she fell for it.

What also might have saved this novel is if it had a British narrator, and if most of its characters were transplanted Brits. As it is, the continual intrusion of British English, coupled with rarely-on-target American English, is incredibly annoying, and detracts completely from the novel's good points. Rosamunde Pilcher is largely successful with her Americans, primarily because she gets them onto her turf. Unfortunately, Trollope bit off far more than she could chew.

Spare yourself the grief and read one of Trollope's many excellent novels, such as The Rector's Wife or A Spanish Lover.

Farber, author of nine previous books and former commentator for NPR's "All Things Considered," brings us the story of two people --- a writer and a young woman, a beautiful and married student of art history. They meet. They discuss their passions for art and literature. They realize that their passions for those subjects is running over into their physical wants for each other. They have an affair. The writer has an artistic endeavor that he wants to partake in with the woman --- observe and study the female body. They photograph their erotic desires and in their heightened sense they discover sex that had not been discovered before. They obsess over the forms and shapes of sex until conflicts begin to emerge.

The book, in parts, is heated and visual, using the sparest of words and the shortest of sentences. At times it's like a poem, sharp and exact, meanings dripping from the words. But the longer that type of writing goes, the less impact it has, and the more exasperating for the reader it can be. Short sentences. Clipped phrases. Quick glimpses. "Merging; impelled by, feeding on, itself. Bewitched. Drifting, dreaming; one flesh. But, oops: hand on, under, around." The book is filled with such phrasing, immediate bursts of words stifled by immediate blockages of periods and semicolons. "Later, when her passion has once again ignited his, he strokes her hair. She draws him to her, wriggling. Baby salmon."

Take away the hindrance of Farber's particular writing style in THE BEHOLDER and it's a scintillating examination of love and art, passions and the human form. Even the cover itself examines these thoughts as it glimpses the female body, a naked torso, the right arm laying across it. Inside the covers gives the reader their own glimpses of the human form and human desires.

--- Reviewed by Jonathan Shipley

Regarding the telling of the story the author does a good job. The book was a bit jumpy, not the best construction of a story. It also tended to drag at times; the author did not have the skill to present a laundry list of facts in an interesting way. The author did do a very good job in documenting his sources. I have read a few books on this topic and this one would probably not be my first choice, I suggest Spy Catcher. This is a good book if you are deeply interested in the topic.

Mask of Treachery serves several roles, as a biography of Blunt, as a history of Cambridge and the English upper classes in the 1930's and 1940's, and as a history of Soviet espionage in Britain. Setting aside the book's primary fault, it does provide a thorough biographical and historical view of Blunt and his surroundings. Costello clearly did very thorough research into the background of Blunt and the others at issue and does present a number of facts and anecdotes about the Cambridge Five that do not appear elsewhere in the numerous other sources on this topic. Additionally, Costello has taken very painstaking steps to provide the sources for his information, footnoting frequently throughout the work; Costello's concern for academic-level historical accuracy is in sharp contrast with that of the cursory, more sensationalistic and conclusory writings on this subject by British journalists such as Knightly, West, and Pincher.

Costello does make one interesting suggestion: that Guy Liddell, a senior officer in MI-5, might have been the elusive top level mole sought after by Peter Wright and Arthur Martin for so many years. There is some degree of plausibility to this theory - Liddell spent so much time socializing with Blunt and Burgess during years in which he was emotionally unstable that he could well have been a prime target for recruitment. Liddell also had access to some of the information that was allegedly leaked to the Soviets, although he probably retired too early from MI5 to fit all of the the major "serials" listed by Wright in his Spycatcher. Many of those in MI5 who knew Liddell vehemently denied any suggestions that he could have spied against Britain, but not much of substance has ever surfaced to support those statements of loyalty. If it were possible to obtain such information (perhaps in a decade or two from the old, as-yet unreleased KGB files) it would be curious to learn if there was another mole in MI5.

Ultimately, though, Costello falls into the same bad habit as his journalistic competitors in this field of espionage history: he develops an hypothesis, supports it with some facts, and thereafter treats his theory as the gospel, proven truth. Other specific criticisms of this book are that Costello spends too much time and too many pages describing the aesthetic influences on Blunt from his public school and his days at Cambridge, and spends a bit too much time on describing Blunt's homosexuality, which tend to drag on rather than provide useful, interesting information. Additionally, Costello's organization of this book is not the best, as he tends to change topics without a logical, relevant segui between them.

All in all, this is a mildly important work for serious historians of Soviet espionage in Britain, but readers must keep in mind that Costello simply made a serious overestimation as to Blunt's importance in the Cambridge ring.