Name: Master Georgie
Rating: 2 (2 reviews)
ISBN: 9780786706976

Beryl Bainbridge

Portrays the horrors of war in the story of a group of British soldiers and their adventures in the nineteenth-century Crimean War

A Novel

Master Georgie

Arianna M

I really wanted to like this but I did not. Nothing compelled me. The narrators change throughout, and I didn't particularly want to hear from any of them, except sometimes Dr. Potter. At least it was a fast enough read.
ETA: Despite my low rating, this isn't a "bad" book. It's well written, and dwells on interesting topics—photography being used as a tool of deception, appearances not telling the whole story, class differences, the relationship between life and death, and the senselessness of war. I just did not like it, even though it presents something I love: different (unreliable) narrators each giving their own account of people and situations, from which you can reconstruct your own view of things, deciding who to trust more and whose opinion to disregard. It's a well constructed book, except I didn't enjoy one bit of it.

Elisabetta

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 1998 SHORTLISTED FOR THE GUARDIAN FICTION PRIZE WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT MEMORIAL PRIZE FOR FICTION WINNER OF THE WH SMITH BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD When Master Georgie - George Hardy, surgeon and photographer - sets off from the cold squalor of Victorian Liverpool for the heat and glitter of the Bosphorus to offer his services in the Crimea, there straggles behind him a small caravan of devoted followers; Myrtle, his adoring adoptive sister; lapsed geologist Dr Potter; and photographer's assistant and sometime fire-eater Pompey Jones, all of them driven onwards through a rising tide of death and disease by a shared and mysterious guilt. Combining a breathtaking eye for beauty with a visceral understanding of mortality, Beryl Bainbridge exposes her enigmatic hero as tenderly and unsparingly as she reveals the filth and misery of war, and creates a novel of luminous depth and extraordinary intensity.

Master Georgie A Novel

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