Somewhere in France

By John Rolfe Gardiner

As John Rolfe Gardiner's gripping and elegant new novel opens, World War I is raging and letters home from Major William Lloyd describe his life as a volunteer doctor in charge of a base hospital in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375407405
• ISBN13: 9780375407406
• Release Date: September 1999
• Publisher: Knopf
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.0" x 1.3" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Craftsmanlike writing; a fine story

Somewhere in France, GardinerIt was the World War, the Great War. U.S. Army Major William Lloyd, M.D., had given up his practice at Roosevelt Hospital in New York to do something important for his country. Now he was somewhere in France. That somewhere, which the mail censors faithfully blotted from his letters to a dysfunctional family back home, was Chaumont.A passage: "On October 3, 1917, a few days before his American medical team arrived to join him in Chaumont, Major Lloyd entered the Hotel Rive Haute for a final inspection. As a roving officer of the Chief Surgeon's staff, he had requisitioned the building for Base Hospital 15 of the Allied Expeditionary Force. A few French casualties were temporarily in beds on the floor, attended by a single French doctor." Base Hospital 15 would soon be doing a thriving business.Another passage: "The first person Dr. Lloyd encountered was one on hands-and-knees, scrubbing the floor. "There was a powerful smell of ammonia around him. It was perfume to the Major's sense of hygiene. This, and the picture of the poor man at his thankless task, turned the officer's mood, filled him with pity and self-reproach. Good enough, he thought, the man must come with the building. I'll make a place for him in the table of organization. `Well done. What's your name.' "HER name was Jeanne Prie (when she wasn't Lucienne de Crouen) -- nurse. Dr. Lloyd made a place for her in his table of organization. She had chosen Jeanne after Jeanne d'Arc (no doubt out of admiration, not imitation, for Joan of Arc is inimitable). She proved to be a credible stand-in for Madame Marie Curie, working tirelessly to concoct vaccines against infections of unknown origins. Unintentionally, Lloyd would secure for himself a place in her life long after his table of organization ceased to exist.An Irishman whose name won't come to mind said unlike a bird we can't, in a story, be in two places at the same time. He should read this, for we often find ourselves with one foot in Chaumont and the other in the family estate of Moriches on Long Island, and that accounts for some of the magic of this story. One element of our magic carpet is Gardiner's craftsmanlike way of putting us observers in one place then the other without our being conscious of our having been transported. Another element is a flow of newsy letters between Lloyd and his wife, instinctively censored by both as they put the best faces on their theaters of operations. Dr. Lloyd's present persona is buttressed by a larger than life view of William Lloyd the schoolboy, resurrected by candid letters to his parents way back when.Gardiner's writing style is as compelling as the story itself - something we hope (and deserve) to find often but don't, especially in current best-sellers. Part of his magic may be attributable to his having had a splendid editor. He offers a prefatory note of thanks to Knopf editor Ann Close, recognized as one of the best around today.While reading this st

Impossible to praise adequately!

The main characters in this book are such unpleasant people you wouldn't want to spend even five minutes with them, at least initially, so the fact that you get involved in the story at all is a huge testament to the author's writing skill! The fact that you eventually love the book and root for the characters' happiness makes him a miracle maker.William Lloyd is a 44-year-old doctor, whose adolescence is laid bare in the letters he has written to his family while a teenager at St. Mark's School. By turns smarmy, arrogant, and devious, he is both subtly and overtly manipulative, ingratiating himself with whoever is in power, wherever he is, both as a teenager and as an adult. Humility and respect for others are virtues incompatible with his belief in his own moral and social superiority. His children are even worse! When William meets Jeanne Prie, a hospital worker in France, where he has been sent during World War I, he finds himself exposed to values and experiences totally foreign to him and begins the long, tortuous process of self-enlightenment, a road he negotiates with the enormous difficulties of the self-blind.It is a testament to the author's vision and immense writing skill that at some point in the first half of the novel he leads us to the slow realization that Lloyd is not a uniquely unpleasant man, that he is the aristocratic product of an age which does not question the morality of social class or its values and behaviors, and we slowly realize that much of the barbarity of World War I itself is a direct result of this same societal blindness. This is more than a brilliant book with an exciting story. It is a realistic recreation of people with the values and mores of the age behaving "normally" under what become extraordinary circumstances.

Homefront vs. the Front Lines

In an earlier novel, "Unknown Soldiers," Gardiner focused on what was happening in an American community while World War II was raging. In "Somewhere in France," he goes further, exploring the dynamics both of homefront and battle front through the tumultuous changes in the lives of the members of one family during World War I. The vivid, sometimes bizarre, events of the story held my attention, but the book's power lay in the way I kept mulling it over after I had read it. The author has thought deeply about the strengths and weaknesses in family bonds, and the influence of shared family values, and readers are likely to gain new perspective on these issues from this readable story.

Simply brilliant

Allow yourself to fall under the spell of Gardiner's opening pages and you won't leave until the story is done. The book is wise, at times shocking, never less than elegant ... compelling storytelling, compulsively readable.