Stories expertly dovetail or run parallel ... So many narrative voices jostling for attention could have proved shrill and disorienting. In fact, their differing tones and textures imbue the proceedings with variety and complexity. This multifaceted novel about belonging, oppression and the enduring power of storytelling is brilliantly ingenious and utterly absorbing.
Ingenious and engaging ... Every time [Rebellion], this character, in tones both self-deprecating and wise, lets us know what it sees and feels and remembers, it enhances our sense of its quirky and necessary presence ... The idea of story in The Pages is multi-layered and fabulously unstable.
Hamilton has great fun with the conceit of the book as its own narrator ... Yet Hamilton’s underlying purpose is deeply serious. With considerable subtlety he shows contemporary horrors mirroring those of almost a century ago ... As befits its narrator, The Pages is full of literary references, in particular to other accounts of love and lovemaking. It offers a richly detailed portrait of Roth himself ... At once allusive, playful, contemplative and consequential, The Pages is a remarkable novel, worthy of its great antecedent.
Inventive ... The reader is dealing with two novels here, and a mosaic of interlocking narratives ... With flair and feeling, Hamilton weaves Roth’s work through his own, in this imaginative act of storytelling ... As human beings, we are nothing but passing facts, Hamilton reminds us. But excellence in literature has the potential for longevity.
You can see why Mr. Hamilton, a perceptive and subtly humorous writer, was tempted to animate a novel that depicts with irony and wry compassion the life of an inconsequential man, the only type of hero that really mattered to Roth ... a capacious hybrid—in parts a quest novel, a love story and a fictionalized biography ... comes to life in the past. Consequently, and perhaps inevitably, Roth’s story is far more affecting than the modern one it shadows: of Lena, her pallid American fiancé and her newfound Chechen refugee soul mate, each of whom seems at times to be more of a symbol than a character. The novel’s theme of history repeating itself is also somewhat clunkily expressed...But Mr. Hamilton’s keen eye—which lights equally on landscape and human eccentricity—and his benevolent wit, both so evident is his superb memoir The Speckled People, here deepen and humanize a commendably erudite and earnest novel.
[Hamilton] uses the adventurous device of employing a copy of the first edition [of Rebellion] as his narrator ... The Pages is a peculiar sort of audio book, ingeniously sympathetic to its inspiration ... At the heart of things is a pretty straightforward mystery yarn ... Multiplicity of narratives has a congestive effect on the pages of The Pages, but the fable-like style means that we generally accept the somewhat flattened nature of his characters. Hamilton’s principal interest here is the interconnectedness of time, rather than the details of individual personalities ... Even with the conventions of fable, it feels excessive to have so many plot lines converging on the same point ... Still, the climax of the novel’s adventure story comes as a surprise.
Brisk and swift ... Although ideas of memory, legacy and repetition — the indelible imprints of history — fill The Pages, it moves with a fast and fluid gait ... As his various threads entwine, Hamilton sometimes risks confusion or distraction. Mostly he sidesteps them thanks to his sharp, laconic, camera’s-eye observation ... The novel’s overlapping strata enrich its texture but can blur its focus ... In Hamilton’s contemporary plot, a far-fetched, thriller-like showdown...leaves everyday realism far behind. With The Pages, as with Roth himself, fable rather than reportage gains the upper hand.
Enticing ... Few contemporary writers share Hamilton’s mastery of English prose ... There is much more to The Pages than an amateur detective plot that concludes with a facile deus ex machina ... [The] most endearing element is the first-person story of the book itself.
As with many of Hamilton’s works, from memoir to fiction, ever-present is the skilful weaving of multiple voices and identities ... As time splits between present and past...we see various reconstructions of the past, retold as if collected in a vast archive ... Hamilton’s novel shows us warnings of what we risk when we choose to ignore the fissures of dark pasts reappearing today.
A novel narrated by a novel — it’s a conceit that could easily devolve into kitsch. But in Hamilton’s hands, it does not ... It helps that Hamilton chose his vehicle well. Rebellion and the story of its author’s life — both of which play prominent roles in The Pages — each contain themes that echo recursively across the near-century since the book’s publication.
Part thriller, part treasure hunt and part love story ... Lena becomes involved with Armin, a young Chechen refugee living in Berlin. This is by far the least successful aspect of the novel. Hamilton’s characters rarely convince as anything other than ciphers, there to develop themes of migration, identity and prejudice. It’s not always subtle ... The Pages is not intended as an act of ventriloquism, but you do occasionally long for Roth’s arch authorial universe, that complex fated world where you simultaneously believe in a character while knowing they are doomed ... What’s never in doubt, however, is Hamilton’s love of Roth’s writing and compassion for him. He writes about the Austrian author and his wife, Friedl, with a rich, sympathetic lyricism ... The chapter towards the end where he visits her in a Vienna sanatorium...is profound and heartbreaking.
The Pages has a clever and appealing conceit: it is narrated by a book—a 1924 first edition of Joseph Roth's novel Die Rebellion ... The book-as-narrator idea has a lot of potential, and Hamilton invests his volume with considerably more than just its nominal contents; it has a history, experience accumulated over nearly a century, and its own voice; it has a personality of its own ... Hamilton struggles a bit with how to make this physical object a plausible narrator and character ... At its worst, the pseudo-dramatic presentation completely undermines the weight of the message ... It's quite a few threads Hamilton weaves together here, and arguably he strays rather far with some of them. They do (mostly) tie together in the end—but it does all feel rather forced ... The novel is also simply too schematic. The author had a clever idea, but the blueprint of how he then mapped the whole story out is still all too evident beneath the narrative ... a decent quick read.
Hamilton performs a provocative feat: the narrator of his new book is a book ... By astutely combining a suspenseful quest, a sharply relevant homage to Roth, and intricate stories of persecution, exile, war, censorship, love, and anguish, Hamilton has created a tale of deep resonance.
Hamilton's artful story teems with subplots ... The novel neatly balances these realistic storylines with fanciful images described in Rebellion’s distinctive, appealing voice ... Lena eventually solves the map mystery, bringing the story full circle to an emotionally satisfying conclusion ... A haunting story that provides a welcome reminder of the enduring lives of books.
