 Reality and truth, fantasy and fiction, hang ten on history, 1999-05-08
I'm sorry for the guy disappointed by the book. I must have gone through six or seven copies of RF in my 20/30s - a good book to give to friends and, as some of the other part-time critics here have written, a very life affirming book.It seems to combine the best of the wonderful chaotic rush that life in adolescence can give you, when you're doing everything for the first of times; with the other pleasures - of age, now - of looking back on the past and realising personal time then is now becoming part of history. Helprin catches that cusp dead on, naturally without pretentious artifice. I'm a Brit, Welsh by background, and RF has an age-spanning resonance for me with 'Oh Lucky Man', a film made in 1974, directed by Lindsay Anderson, a 'new realism' Brit, socialist/surrealist theatre director. He's also famous for 'This Sporting Life' and 'If' - which is about English public schoolboys rebelling (I've just remembered the recent US school massacre and made the connection)and taking the guns from the school OTC armoury and attacking the parents and teachers as they come out from a memorial ceremony. That was made in 1970, so I don't think the lawyers can class it as an influential video nasty. 'Oh Lucky Man' is a modern equivalent of a Mystery Play. Young Man is tempted, learns, becomes wiser in different ways, and then is plucked from the crowd to star in 'Oh Lucky Man'. A similar focus on the intensity of experience of life with Helprin, but of 'American' as both immigrant and explorer - but a stranger always in his adopted lands - the subtitle of the book is, I seem to remember: Marshall Pearl, The Adventures of a Foudling. Which, when you think about it, is actually a fairly Dickensian/middle Victorian sort of subtitle ? Some keys are maybe there ? In RF, Helprin has created a Dickensian kind of sprawl of characterisation - though not as caricatured as Dickens; a span of history and class; and a hero with a self-creating will and destiny who keeps getting caught up in history. Read this book ! P.S. Also read Alan Garner's collection of Essays
 Read "Soldier of the Great War", 1999-05-02
Having read "Soldier of the Great War", I was disappointed in this novel. "Soldier" was superb! I found myself suspecting that this was an earlier work, perhaps his first novel (which it is). It is broad in scope and bold in vision, but too often the use of language is pretentious and obscure. There is some excellent writing, which previews what is to come in "Soldier". But "Refiner's Fire" lacks the control and the consistent elegance that I had expected and which one finds in his later work. This book is an interesting read for one who enjoys observing the development and maturation of a great writer.
A fine example from one of todays finest writers., 1998-02-12
Helprin tells a story of grand scope and vision. A single lifetime that goes from foundling to Admiral and covers the globe. Helprin's ability to make believable the most fantastic of situations is unparalled. A book worthy of several reads.
The finest last page since A Farewell to Arms, 1999-04-23
A wonderful novel, typical of the author, that sprawls across the last century from Czarist Russia to the founding of Israel to the Hudson Valley to Rastafrian Jamaica...and so on. The story, while bordering on the absurd at times, will keep you cemented to your reading chair, and the ending is perfect, a complete validation of the novel's central premise: life is beautiful.
DO NOT READ THE ENDING FIRST, 1997-08-19
If you do, you will deprive yourself of one of the joy's of reading this book. While endings typically conclude, surprise, or leave questions, Refiner's Fire does so much more: It affirms life. Read the book, page by page, and let the story carry you away. Then, as the pages remaining become thinner and thinner you will race to finish -- but you must not. Allow it to unfold and experience one of the most joyful and moving books ever. Just terrific!
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