The Giant, O'Brien - Softcover

Mantel, Hilary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312426887 ISBN 13: 9780312426880

Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL, 2007

Synopsis

New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year

London, 1782: center of science and commerce, home to the newly rich and the desperately poor. In the midst of it all is the Giant, O'Brien, a freak of nature, a man of song and story who trusts in myths, fairies, miracles, and little people. He has come from Ireland to exhibit his size for money. O'Brien's opposite is a man of science, the famed anatomist John Hunter, who lusts after the Giant's corpse as a medical curiosity, a boon to the advancement of scientific knowledge.

In her acclaimed novel, two-time Man Booker Prize winning author Hilary Mantel tells of the fated convergence of Ireland and England. As belief wrestles knowledge and science wrestles song, so The Giant, O'Brien calls to us from a fork in the road as a tale of time, and a timeless tale.

About this title

Review

Like Andrew Miller (Ingenious Pain, Casanova in Love) and Penelope Fitzgerald (The Blue Flower), Hilary Mantel turns to the 18th century in order to make a universal point. Her eighth novel, The Giant, O'Brien, takes place during that bifurcation of mind and spirit commonly known as the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment. The year is 1782 and Charles O'Brien has fled Ireland, bringing both his massive frame and his ancient folk tales to England, where he hopes to make his fortune as a sideshow exhibit. "His appetite was great, as befitted him; he could eat a granary, he could drink a barrel. But now that all Ireland is coming down to ruin together, how will giants thrive? He had made a living by going about and being a pleasant visitor who fetched not just the gift of his giant presence but also stories and songs ... many hearths had welcomed him as a prodigy, a conversationalist, an illustration from nature's book. Nature's book is little read now, and he thought this: I had better make a living in the obvious way. I will make a living from being tall."

Unfortunately, O'Brien's height attracts more attention than he might wish for: John Hunter, a surgeon, becomes fascinated with the giant and obsessed with the possibility of dissecting him after he's dead. Thus Mantel sets up the central conflict of her novel: Hunter's thirst for knowledge and fame versus O'Brien's conviction that, without his body, his soul cannot go to heaven. In the mean streets of 18th-century London, the author explores the division of soul and body, imagination and rationalism, as she juxtaposes the two men's lives. In this collision of cultures and paradigms, she offers no easy answers, but instead turns a disturbing spotlight on questions that continue to resonate to the present day. --Alix Wilber

Review

"Brilliant....A perfect marriage of style and substance." --"Toronto Star
"A novelist without peer in her generation . . . No reader who loves fiction should miss this opportunity to read this extraordinary work."--"San Francisco Chronicle"
"Mantel's novel is in one sense a brilliant pastiche of Swift and Joyce [but] it becomes her own style, as acute and arresting as is her vision of history."--"The New York Review of Books"

A novelist without peer in her generation . . . No reader who loves fiction should miss this opportunity to read this extraordinary work. "San Francisco Chronicle"

Mantel's novel is in one sense a brilliant pastiche of Swift and Joyce [but] it becomes her own style, as acute and arresting as is her vision of history. "The New York Review of Books""

A novelist without peer in her generation . . . No reader who loves fiction should miss this opportunity to read this extraordinary work. San Francisco Chronicle

Mantel's novel is in one sense a brilliant pastiche of Swift and Joyce [but] it becomes her own style, as acute and arresting as is her vision of history. The New York Review of Books

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"A novelist without peer in her generation . . . No reader who loves fiction should miss this opportunity to read this extraordinary work." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Mantel's novel is in one sense a brilliant pastiche of Swift and Joyce [but] it becomes her own style, as acute and arresting as is her vision of history." --The New York Review of Books

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0312426887
• ISBN 13: 9780312426880
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 208