There's no point in writing a review about just HOW good a writer Faulks is. The word on this fellow has long been out. But I am amazed to see just how deep and wide his toolbox is.

This book just hits the ground running in a way that reminded me of T.C. Boyle, Michael Ondaatje and the late great Robertson Davies. Yeah, he's THAT good.

The puzzle for me is why he is also the new James Bond novelist. I'm quite sure this will be the best written and possibly most intricate Bond novel ever - but I'm not sure this isn't a little like killing the proverbial gnat with a howitzer. Which book of proverbs had howitzers? In any case, it will gets the job done but it's probably a bit of overkill.

I suspect a truckload of money and some fan-boy idolatry were involved.

- Barney Dannelke ( )

This is an incredibly incredibly ambitious and thoughtful, much more subtle and wide-ranging than the previous works by Faulks that I've read. It deals with some of the same issues that he's dealt with in his previous works—the spectre of the First World War hangs over this as it does in Birdsong—but this is a much more expansive book, one which looks at sanity and insanity, what it is to be human, what it is to think.

This can, admittedly, make the book a little heavy-going at times, especially since Faulks manages a very admirable pastiche of the kind of writing to which medical researchers were prone in the nineteenth century, but I found it fascinating and thought-provoking, sufficiently so that I devoured it in the departure lounge/on the plane—which is definitely a sign of approval given that it's over six hundred pages long, and the flight was very much a short haul one.

The prose is beautifully lucid, evocative without ever being anything like purple, and Faulks somehow manages the feat of shifting the tone of the novel almost imperceptibly as it progresses, so that the opening feels very appropriate to its setting (the early 1870s) while its conclusion is very much of the twentieth century. If the novel has a flaw, it is that its characters always take second place to its ideas; Thomas and Jacques, Sonia and Kitty, though finely drawn, are never characters which seize the imagination. ( )

Apparently got some bad reviews but I loved this book. Fascinating. Great detail. Charts the decades with aplomb. ( )

Breathtaking ( )

This is my first experience of Sebastian Faulks and unfortunately it is not a favourable one. I plodded my way through the novel struggling to find a character or something that would engage my attention but nothing seemed to work. I eventually gave up two thirds of the way through; something which I very rarely do! A poor read. Hopefully his other novels are better. ( )