Jeffrey Archer's final novel, Adam & Eve, follows two children born on Armistice Day in 1918, hours apart but into vastly different worlds. Eve is the daughter of an earl, while Adam is the son of a shepherd. Despite class divisions, they forge a deep bond that endures through the turbulent decades between the world wars.
As Britain faces the threat of Nazi invasion in 1940, their courage, sacrifices and choices unexpectedly influence the nation's destiny. Spanning the Norfolk Broads, Dunkirk and wartime Britain, the novel predictably but not unenjoyably rattles along, one of those potboilers that ignores adjectives and yet manages to conjure up a completely inhabitable world.
A plot worthy of Archer himself
In a plot development worthy of Archer himself, he passed away this week, to largely generous notices, and with good reason. The book proudly said it would be his last. Archer, who has sold over 300 million books, was a fixture of the 1980s, accused of this, lambasted for that, and host of phenomenally popular parties in his swanky Thames-side apartment.
Reading a Jeffrey Archer book was always a bit like listening to Capital Gold — they weren't offensive, there would be parts of the experience you'd enjoy, but the overall experience was a bit “meh”. However, I've always rather despised the snobs who dismiss so-called popular novelists, as to me they always come across as the grammar school kids who patronised us secondary modern kids when I was young.
Gripping almost till the end
There are some great lines in it, which you feel Archer could have littered the book with if he had wanted it to be read by fewer people. “Every Brancaster had hobbies,” he writes. “For some of their ancestors it had been fine paintings, pedigree horses, even first-edition books. For the ninth Earl of Brancaster, it was vintage wines that gathered dust in his cellar, while his brother specialised in second-edition women, but only after leaving a roulette wheel that rarely settled on his chosen number.”
The plot is pretty good, I took to the characters, and it's all quite engrossing. I suppose my problem is that I didn't really care enough about what happened in the end, even though I enjoyed it when I got there. But then I think that's probably my fault, and not Jeffrey Archer's.
