Amazon.com Review
Beryl Bainbridge seems drawn to disaster. First she tackled the unfortunate Scott expedition to the South Pole in The Birthday Boys; later (but emphatically pre-DiCaprio) came the sinking of the Titanic, in Every Man for Himself. Now, in her 3rd historical novel (and her 16th overall), she takes on the Crimean War, and the result is a slim, gripping volume with all of the doomed intensity of the Light Brigade's charge--but, thankfully, without the Tennysonian bombast. "Some pictures," a character confides, "would only cause alarm to ordinary folk." There's a warning concealed here, and one that easily disturbed readers would do well to heed: Master Georgie is intense, disturbing, revelatory--and not always pretty to look at.
Bainbridge's narrative circles round the enigmatic figure of George Hardy, a surgeon, amateur photographer, alcoholic, and repressed homosexual who counters the dissipation of his prosperous Liverpool life by heading for the Crimean Peninsula in 1854. His journey and subsequent tour of duty are told in three very different voices: Myrtle, an orphan whose lifelong loyalty to her "Master Georgie" becomes an overriding obsession; Pompey Jones, street urchin, fire-eater, photographer, and George's sometime lover; and Dr. Potter, George's scholarly brother-in-law, whose retreat from the war's carnage and into books takes on a tinge of madness.
United by a sudden death in a Liverpool brothel in 1846, these characters plumb the curious workings of love, war, class, and fate. In between, Bainbridge frames an unforgettable series of tableaux morts: a dying soldier, one lens of his glasses "fractured into a spider's web"; a decapitated leg, toes "poking through the shreds of a cavalry boot"; two dead men "on their knees, facing one another, propped up by the pat-a-cake thrust of their hands." Glimpsed as if sidewise and then passed over in language that is as understated as it is lovely, these are images that sear into the brain. Master Georgie is full of such moments, horrors painted with an exquisite brush. --Mary Park
From Library Journal
Bainbridge (Every Man for Himself, LJ 9/15/96) begins her story in 1846 in Liverpool, England. Myrtle is an orphan, taken in and fussed over by the Hardy family until it gets a dog. She stays on as a servant of sorts and becomes smitten with Georgie, the son of the house. Although she follows him everywhere, he rarely acknowledges her, which does not cool her determined adoration. Georgie becomes a doctor, and Myrtle becomes the mother of his children when his own wife is unable to produce an heir. When Georgie volunteers for medical service in the Crimean War, Myrtle goes with him. Even learning that Georgie prefers men does not dampen her unrequited love. Though ascertaining who is speaking can be difficult, as a different character narrates each chapter, this story is well researched and well written. It includes particularly vivid descriptions of the war and the Victorian era, including the sexual undertones and overtones of the day. Recommended.?Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Watch Hill
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