The chill of the political events occurring outside the Metropol is certainly felt, but for the Count and his friends, the passage of time is "like the turn of a kaleidoscope." Not for nothing is Casablanca his favorite film. Though Stalin and Khrushchev make their presences felt, Towles largely treats politics as a dark, distant shadow. Spread across four decades, this is in all ways a great novel, a nonstop pleasure brimming with charm, personal wisdom, and philosophic insight. For the Count, that way of life ultimately becomes less about aristocratic airs and privilege than generosity and devotion. "We are bound to find comfort from the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade," says the companionable narrator. A man of refined taste in wine, food, and literature, he strives to maintain a daily routine, exploring the nooks and crannies of the hotel, bonding with staff, accepting the advances of attractive women, and forming what proves to be a deeply meaningful relationship with a spirited young girl, Nina. Inside the elegant Metropol, located near the Kremlin and the Bolshoi, the Count slowly adjusts to circumstances as a "Former Person." He makes do with the attic room, to which he is banished after residing for years in a posh third-floor suite.
Sentenced to house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel by a Bolshevik tribunal for writing a poem deemed to encourage revolt, Count Alexander Rostov nonetheless lives the fullest of lives, discovering the depths of his humanity. A heated romance and chase in a splashy, scary setting. By the close, there have deaths of varying nastiness (how about being ground between walls and a pryf?)-and a lovers' escape. The chase is lengthy and studded with such elements as: the strategy and antics of the allied ``Quicken-tree'' people, of ancient (perhaps faerie?) origins struggles through caves of ice and utter darkness fantastic beauty and horror the pryf (giant sea worms) and a magic door leading to the sea. A ruse, planned by Dain, derails his pursuit, and the pair escape, on the way becoming lovers in some luxuriously steamy scenes. Mutual uninterest, even dislike, evolves into a fascination with the delicious complexities of each other. The sorcerer Dain, who works his ``magic'' in a tower of the castle, has no interest in Ceridwen but hates Caradoc, and so rescues the girl and begins to heal her. There, she's derisively tortured and displayed. When she's mature, Ceridwen is affianced to Caradoc but flees into the forest, where she's captured and taken to the Castle Wydehaw. The children are whisked away by a Druid's daughter and sent to be raised in the homes of devout Christians. In the Prologue, two small children, the boy Mychael and his twin sister Ceridwen, are lost in the caves beneath the castle of Carn Merioneth as their mother, descendent of a priestess, is about to perform a rite to ``open the door between worlds.'' But then death and horror arrive in the terrifying person of the vicious Caradoc, ``the Boar,'' who kills all and becomes the new lord of Carn Merioneth.
A first hardcover in which a love affair of erotic discovery and passion is staged against a background of horror and ancient rites in 12th-century Wales-and brought to a gripping conclusion in a chase through fantastic underground caverns.
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