WHITE BLOOD
For a sample of White Blood
click here
Click here for: Thomas Gage reviews and synopses
The Temple of Optimism reviews and synopses
Here are the Reviews:
Read the American Pre-reviews! (published in USA on January 9th 2007)
Just out from the Library Journal
Fleming, whose historical novels Thomas Gage and The Temple of Optimism have earned stellar reviews in England, has had a mixed reception here. This third novel may decisively tip the scales in his favor. Charlie Doig, a Nabokovian figure of Russian heritage and entomological enthusiasms, is an unforgettable character. His saga stretches from Burma's remoteness to Smolensk's pre-1917 cosiness as he strives to make his mark in the world.
From the first chapters showcasing lusty encounters to the closing chapters ablaze with the Russian Revolution's gore, this work is energetic, lavishly expressive, and a great read. That it also pulses with historic accuracy is a reader's bonus. Nephew of the spymaster Ian Fleming, James deserves a new generation of Fleming fans of his own.
Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA
In a starred pre-review Publishers Weekly:
‘In this crackling, flamboyant novel…Charlie Doig lives in his ancestral Smolensk home in Russia as the Romanov dynasty wanes…Amid a parade of hilarious secondary characters (including the Mongolian manservant Kobi and the potentate Count Igor Rykov), Charlie wrests Elizaveta from a rival, and the passion of the newlyweds is finally consummated at the novel’s climactic midpoint. The appearance…of Prokhor Glebov, a Bolshevik and the novel’s avenging angel, sets up the book’s lingering final turn…In the book’s wintry denouement, Charlie’s narration pulls slowly back on events – the revolution’s settling of scores and literal severing of ties with the czarists – and then freezes. It’s funny, sad and magical.’
‘Fleming has created a womaniser whom James Bond might envy. Compared with protagonist Charlie Doig, Tom Jones was a cub scout and the lustful aristocrats of Les Liaisons Dangereuses harmless upper-class twits. He’s a sexual athlete…a vainglorious priapist…a romantic…the kind of macho man whom Englishmen would pronounce a cad and feminists call out as a clueless sexist pig…Then, as if we were lost in War and Peace, Reds and Whites begin slaughtering one another, and the billeting of two soldiers at the Pink House sows the seeds of the ultimate challenge to Charlie’s imperturbable will. The action sequences virtually sing with energy, and the novel’s blistering pace never lets up for a moment.
Fleming is indeed skilled, and the book is a pulse-pounding read. But, like Charlie’s innumerable paramours, you may hate yourself in the morning for having enjoyed it so much.’
May 14, 2006, Jessica Mann -: “The Revolution turns Charlie [Doig] into a ruthless, remorseless fighter. The book is beautifully written, with baroque energy and style. It is not at all a comfortable read, for one is taken right into the pitiless barbarity of revolutionary Russia’s murder, misery and martyrdom.”
 |
White Blood: Cartoon by Alison Lang for the Sunday Times
|
May 7th, 2006, David Horspool -:
“The key to good historical fiction is getting the balance between the history and the fiction right.
To put it another way, it is a question of handling irony. If a writer sets a novel among events of world-changing significance, as James Fleming has done in White Blood...
the temptation is to nudge the reader too vigorously with the historical context of every character’s actions. Fleming avoids these pitfalls deftly…[He] handles the dramatic irony of his story cleverly, hinting at but rarely over-emphasising the way larger historical events will have the final say in his characters’ fortunes. When the conflagration arrives, no amount of forewarning can prepare us for its gruesome effects…White Blood allows the voice of history to speak for itself.”
April 15th, 2006, Lewis Jones -: “Despite its many virtues, Fleming’s latest novel is deeply flawed…It moves at a cracking pace, with plenty of atmosphere and sympathy. Provincial aristocratic life – the milieu of Turgenev and Chekhov – is evoked with affection and humour, while our knowledge of its imminent doom imbues the proceedings with tragic tension and poignancy. The wait is unbearable, and when the Bolshevik horror finally arrives, it is much more unbearable. White Blood has romance and pathos in spades.
The trouble is with the narrator, Charlie Doig, [who is] violent, snobbish, boastful and lecherous in a rather sinister way (“Her small tufted breasts pressed at her shirt pleats. I could make out just enough of them to imagine their pull and slap”).”
April 2nd, 2006, Sam Phipps -: “In White Blood, the flavour of a specific historical period is again uncannily convincing, without the research getting in the way…The set-up at the Pink House is like a Chekhov play fast-forwarded a few decades to the point of revolution. Fading grandeur, hearsay, wild theorising and denial are the order of the day as the inmates of this cocooned world get by. Flemings’s evocation of this atmosphere is excellent, and he ratchets up the sense of menace…to a brutal and sadistic climax, in keeping with the nature of those times.”
May 24/31, 2006, Nicholas Foxton -: “In his third novel James Fleming carves out his turf in pre-revolutionary Russia and a variety of exotic locales from Burma to Bokhara, with a relish and elan that is both moving and gripping…He captures the contradictions of the period and the rich flavours of elegance and terror compellingly. This is a tense, thrilling and at times darkly comic novel with a complex central character who, in the best passages, bursts off the page, his ‘proper Russian balls’ swinging with arrogance.”
May 6th, 2006, Sam Thompson -: “Doig’s hungry, sensual vitality is also Fleming’s method: the novel wants to cram in very possible detail of place and period….Fleming finds an unencumbered, historically penetrating language in which the simplest expository sentence can bring prose, story and setting into a crisp and evocative alignment.”
April 8th, 2006, Honor Clerk -:“It comes as no surprise that behind James Fleming’s new novel of drama, guts and good old Russian melancholy looms the unavoidable presence of War and Peace…If one is never able to forget the ultimate doom that hangs over this whole society, the savage confrontation of Red and White is played out in Doig’s life with an originality and narrative tension that keeps one hoping to the end.
It would ruin a cracking story to give more away, but from entomology to Revolution the locations and scenes of Fleming’s narrative vividly imprint themselves…It is the telling details that brings the whole thing to life: the clink of a signet ring on a porcelain teacup, sewing stuffed into a bag of maroon ribbed velvet, the pleat of snow made by a garden gate…The narrative, the dialogue and the intensity of Doig’s emotions drive the story to a savage climax that reads like a modern thriller. It is the best sort of historical novel.”
April 2006, Andrew Barrow -:“This extremely wintry and hard-hitting adventure story is set in provincial Russia. The narrator is a big, bold, half-likeable man called Charlie Doig, who has a Russian mother and ‘proper Russian balls that swing like the planets’. Now in his late twenties, he has already had a wild life…
Told in an intimate, chatty style, and in prose of great originality – and angularity – this is a historical evocation at times as powerful as the account of pre-1914 Berlin that the late, great Sybille Bedford gave us in A Legacy. From its opening pages onwards, the narrator shows a desperate, obsessional quality which brings out the full, bloody, sensual brutality of his situation…all these head-spinning events are related with almost cinematic force and tension.
In …[an] unforgettable final scene, horse-drawn cabs swerve around Doig as he dances with an imaginary Elizaveta in the middle of the Nevsky Prospekt. And then discovers his hands are empty. This extraordinary novel mad end on a sad note…but readers will surely welcome its author to the ranks of our greatest storytellers.” more
BOOKS QUARTERLY
April 2006, Hubert Roth -:“While the snow falls Glebov and Doig’s instant mutual hatred escalates into a private war whose cunning barbarity matches that of the Great War until it reaches a truly shattering climax. James Fleming develops the novel’s central themes of suffering, retribution and redemption with almost unbearable intensity, and in doing so has created a truly Russian epic. Its language displays a beguiling richness that can contain heart-rending tenderness and infernal cruelty in the space of a single phrase.”
April 14th, 2006, Drew MacLeod -: “To me, the opening sentence of a book is vital …‘Hale knew three hours after arriving in Brighton that they meant to murder him,’ tells you most of what you need to know about Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. Similarly in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’ encapsulates perfectly the turmoil of the French Revolution.
White Blood begins: ‘My father, George Doig, died of the plague.’ It’s a bold beginning: it says ‘here is a writer who can tell a story’ and, my goodness, James Fleming can tell a story….The last third is as taut as any thriller I have read. As Doig and the other protagonists become effectively trapped in the Pink House and its grounds by weather, war and imminent revolution, the tension becomes almost palpable and we see that James Fleming, as well as writing beautiful prose, can conjure up moments of page-turning intensity. Cliched as it is to say, I simply could not put this book down.”
Sue Baker, making White Blood her Book of the Month in Publishing News
“I’m grateful to Fleming for reminding me just how exciting a good novel can be.” more
