Word: spenser
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
About a fifth of the way into his 13th and best mystery novel, Robert B. Parker explicitly acknowledges what he is up to: he seeks to re-create, in contemporary context, the medieval quest. In A Catskill Eagle, his hard-boiled detective, Spenser, vows to rescue a maiden imprisoned in a tower. But the modern world, with its complexities ranging from feminism to the military- industrial complex, has all but nullified the chance for such straightforward valor. The "maiden" is Spenser's estranged girlfriend, Susan Silverman; her supposed captor is Spenser's rival for her love; her disappearance...
Parker allows Spenser full awareness of these conundrums without turning the man of action into an egghead, and brings off the baroque and potentially murky tale with characteristic clarity, humor and excitement...
...characters only a short ego trip away from Manhattan and Los Angeles. The new publisher of Country Daze, a Perrier-and-lime sort of publication, remarks: "I discriminate enough to know who means most to me. I mean most to me." So, apparently, does everyone else. Lucy Spenser, who writes a Miss Lonelyhearts column for the magazine under the pen name Cindi Coeur, is having a sporadic affair with her editor Hildon and trying to figure out why her old friend Les dumped her. Lucy's summer is further disrupted by the arrival of her niece Nicole, a teenage star...
Those who pick up this allusion to fanciful old tales may move to the head of the class. Lodge sets his swelling cast of characters into frantic motion across what only looks like the contemporary world; in truth, they move through enchanted old paths out of Ariosto, Spenser and the Arthurian legends. As he takes up the pursuit of Angelica, Persse becomes Percival on the trail of the Grail. For Zapp the quest centers on the newly endowed UNESCO chair in literary criticism, a post that pays $100,000 a year, tax free, and carries no duties whatever...
...manner in which she has written her books. Allegory, that stately, illustrated progress toward foregone conclusions, worked best in ages of faith, when author and readers agreed on the subjects of good and evil. Such has not been the case since roughly the time of Edmund Spenser and his Faerie Queene, yet Murdoch, a philosophy don at Oxford, has successfully built a career on this outdated literary genre. Her characters manifestly stand for abstract values; they are figures in a pattern of moral design and significance. The question in her fiction is not what happens but why. And allegory...