5 reviews for Eye of the storm
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Eye of the storm
by Jack Higgins
Description:
Former allies in the IRA, Sean Dillon and Martin Brosnam have chosen different paths. Now Dillon is a terrorist for hire, a master of disguise employed by Saddam Hussein. Brosnan is the one man who knows Dillon’s strengths and weaknesses and brilliant mastery of espionage. Once friends, now enemies, they are playing the deadliest game of their careers. A game that culminates in a frightening and true event: Iraq’s attempted mortar attack on the British war cabinet at 10 Downing Street in February 1991.
About The Author
Jack Higgins (born 27 July 1929) is the principal pseudonym of British novelist Harry Patterson. He is one of the best-selling authors of popular thrillers and espionage novels. His breakthrough novel The Eagle Has Landed (1975) sold over 50 million copies and was adapted into a successful film by the same title. Some of his other notable books are A Prayer for the Dying (1987), The Eagle Has Flown (1991), Thunder Point (1993), Angel of Death (1995), Flight of Eagles (1998), and Day of Reckoning (2000). His 84 novels in total have sold over 150 million copies and have been translated into 55 languages
Skryf Review
“Amazing Reading”
Sejal
After much effort and commencing this book several times I managed to finish. It’s a very satisfying read though it can be hard going because of the stream of consciousness, which gives insight into the main characters as the narrative unfolds inside their minds (and so we can’t escape intimacy with them, or feeling what they do), and often with the ailing Elizabeth Hunter, her mind wanders into the past. The story is about those who gather at Elizabeth’s sick bed, those who nurse her and her adult children who have long departed to Europe but who return to Sydney, not so much out of affection, but for their inheritance. Most of the characters are weak and vulnerable, and terribly flawed but it doesn’t seem to matter whether they draw our empathy or whether we like them. Basil has been knighted for his contributions to stage and Dorothy is a princess (granted his acting career in going down the gurgler and her prince left her), and when they come to Elizabeth’s bed side, she wields such influence over them that they may as well be little children. Dorothy compares her mother’s love to a jewelled scabbard in which a sword is hidden, and she could easily thrash it about and cut off your ears, fingers ‘or worse impale the hearts of those who worshipped.’ Elizabeth is controlling, cruel and vain, and you wonder whether she has known love, which is very different to us knowing that she has known sex. She loved her husband Bill in a way, as she nursed him in his last days.
Naman
one thing, it goes on way too long. For another, though there are some moving scenes and moments of sympathy with characters, generally the tone is hateful, the characters appalling, and there is no redemption at all. And the long, descriptive but metaphoric sentences do seem to be too much fun and play for the author and his ego, not enough editing to make it easy, fun reading for us as well as reduce the size of the novel. Not always a bad thing believe it or not.However, I do appreciate ambition. And though it could have been reduced I did find plenty to ponder in the relationships between dying mum (Lear, yes and no) her incestuous children, and the crazy staff that look after her. Kind of like The Corrections without the humor. But dying and ageing isn’t funny, is it?
Tisha
I was hoping, as I began reading Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm, that there would be heaps of erudite reviews out there in cyberspace, to help me make sense of it so that I didn’t write anything really inane here. Alas, no, hardly anybody has tackled it so at this stage I am free to interpret it any way I like and few but experts skulking in academia will be any the wiser. I expect I’ve missed heaps. Patrick White’s books are like that, and that’s what makes them so good. Each time I re-read one, especially if in the interim I’ve stumbled on some other work of literature that’s he’s referenced, I enjoy it more because I notice new things…The Complete Review found The Eye of the Storm ‘impressive’ and recommends it for readers with ‘staying power’. Anderson Brown in Puerto Rico had a go at it, intrigued by the exotic idea of a Nobel Prize winning author being ’an Australian, no less’. But apart from noting that White’s ‘terrain is the nature of consciousness’ approached in a ’painterly’ way, he doesn’t have a lot to say in his review. Martha Duffy at Time thought it ‘pallid and self-indulgent’ and wished that ‘that the storm would blow every bit of it away’. (She was a journalist who started in fashion magazines and a royal watcher, so make of her vehemence what you will).
Pooja
Dreaming to inherit big money a son and a daughter return to their terminally ill mother but even on her deathbed she remains a tyrant and keeps ruling with an iron fist.“She also knew she had no desire to die however stagnant her life became: she only hoped she would be allowed to experience again that state of pure, living bliss she was now and then allowed to enter.”Patrick White was a psychologically bottomless writer and in his merciless analysis of the family relationships in The Eye of the Storm he is gloomily and colourfully sarcastic