Birthday Boys

"Bringing her subversive and ever-mischievous imagination to bear on the subject [of Scott's polar expedition, Ms. Bainbridge] fills in the details neglected by Scott's diary....[The] five monologues, which contain some of the most convincing and slyly revealing first-person narrative I've ever read..., relate a story far more interesting than that of five virtuous Englishmen rising nobly to the occasion in extreme circumstances; instead, they present us with a microcosmic society of flawed individuals, pushed and pulled even in a frozen wilderness by the subtle dictates of class, personality and ambition....Ms. Bainbridge is too subtle a writer to engage in blatant polemics, but her novel does...seem to pass judgment on the whole ethos of action, conquest and empire upon which so much of European history has been based."Bainbridge, Beryl is the author of 'Birthday Boys', published 1995 under ISBN 9780786702077 and ISBN 0786702079.