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Distance
Commander Penn Fuller, USN, comes from a family whose tradition of service in the U.S. Navy stretches back two centuries. He was a deep-water sailor who loved the sea and his life in the Navy. Combat in Iraq, however, left him with a distinguished record, but damaged physically and mentally. Gone to ground at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, he tries to make the best of his situation by pursuing a doctoral degree and publishing a book on Naval river operations during the Iraq war. The doctorate and the distinctions he’s earned, however, offer no redemption. For him they're just hollow credentials that cannot comfort, heal or vindicate anything he's done, and cannot return him to the way he was before the war. Post-traumatic stress, intermittent physical pain, and self-doubt overshadow everything he does. He buries his feelings in work, despises his own self-pity and wants, above everything, to meet that someone who’ll be the focus of his life and help restore him to what he was. Harriet, grand-aunt and doyenne of the family repeatedly tries to engage him with women she thinks will help his career. One of them, Kate Hobson, comes close, but it’s not until Penn Fuller researches the shadowy life and career of his Great-grandfather, Vice-Admiral John Pennington, that he discovers long-hidden truths about his ancestry and also finds the love that will bring him the salvation he seeks. Penn’s journey of discovery takes him from Annapolis to Vermont to Japan and the revelation of family and official secrets that change his life and color historical events with the unique contributions of an ancestor whose sense of honor and life-long commitment to the woman he loved overcame vast distances of location, time and culture.
402 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 5, 2013
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 19, 2015
If you like a good yarn that's a believable story with a number of interesting, engaging characters then you may well enjoy this tale. Add to that some very circuitous routes they travel purposefully before each finds a deep love. Many kinds of distance have to be overcome for each thread to ravel properly. No one has a quick or easy time of it - not even the two who fall in love ostensibly at first sight. The main character is a naval officer, Penn Fuller, who works through his own twists and turns as he researches his great-grandfather's convoluted life (who was a Vice Admiral in the USN).
You also get some history to go with your fiction. And, best of all, you really care about practically every single person in this story - even some of the seemingly incidental ones.
One interesting side note, especially for opera fans, is the way our author reworks the story of the Puccini's opera, Madame Butterfly. (And opera buffs will often lightly dismiss some of the silly stories used in operas. If you doubt that, ask an aficionado about Verdi's Il Trovatore and you'll get an eye-roll and a guffaw. It makes Butterfly look like the great story-telling of Dickens or Tolstoy.) Ryan's is largely more believable. Not just opera fans will be gratified by that.
The author is adept at illustrating the feelings and reasoning of each character as they weave and wend their individual ways. At times they seem to be in a dark wood wandering, to coin somebody else's phrase. But persistence and a follow-your-gut pugnacity drives them to pursue their dreams and love. This is a very enjoyable story.
I think the thing I most enjoyed, though, was the same quality that Nabokov appreciated so much in Tolstoy. In his Lectures on Russian Literature he said, "No wonder, then, that elderly Russians at their evening tea talk of Tolstoy's characters as of people who really exist, people to whom their friends may be likened...Readers call Tolstoy a giant because...he remains always of exactly our own stature, exactly keeping pace with us instead of passing by in the distance..." Although I'm a bigger fan of Tolstoy than the author this quote summed up my deepest appreciation of this story. I have very little in common with his characters and their milieu but I felt a similar kinship to them as human beings.
You also get some history to go with your fiction. And, best of all, you really care about practically every single person in this story - even some of the seemingly incidental ones.
One interesting side note, especially for opera fans, is the way our author reworks the story of the Puccini's opera, Madame Butterfly. (And opera buffs will often lightly dismiss some of the silly stories used in operas. If you doubt that, ask an aficionado about Verdi's Il Trovatore and you'll get an eye-roll and a guffaw. It makes Butterfly look like the great story-telling of Dickens or Tolstoy.) Ryan's is largely more believable. Not just opera fans will be gratified by that.
The author is adept at illustrating the feelings and reasoning of each character as they weave and wend their individual ways. At times they seem to be in a dark wood wandering, to coin somebody else's phrase. But persistence and a follow-your-gut pugnacity drives them to pursue their dreams and love. This is a very enjoyable story.
I think the thing I most enjoyed, though, was the same quality that Nabokov appreciated so much in Tolstoy. In his Lectures on Russian Literature he said, "No wonder, then, that elderly Russians at their evening tea talk of Tolstoy's characters as of people who really exist, people to whom their friends may be likened...Readers call Tolstoy a giant because...he remains always of exactly our own stature, exactly keeping pace with us instead of passing by in the distance..." Although I'm a bigger fan of Tolstoy than the author this quote summed up my deepest appreciation of this story. I have very little in common with his characters and their milieu but I felt a similar kinship to them as human beings.
Displaying 1 of 1 review