Natural Elements (Vintage)
Mason’s first novel was published while he was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate at Oxford; this third effort is an immensely readable magnum opus that encompasses the Boer War, the French Resistance, the conflict in Iraq, geriatric psychiatry, high finance, and metallurgy. Sometimes Mason’s meticulous research threatens to intrude on the narrative—we learn a little too much about osmium-carbon double bonds, for instance—and the link between the story’s many disparate elements can be strained. Mason is at his most engaging when he lets the details fall away and deals in unabashed melodrama. There is a touch of Daphne du Maurier in the way an elderly woman, deposited in a nursing home by her high-flying commodities-trading daughter, stalks its antiseptic hallways avenging herself on nocturnal hallucinations from her past.Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.