It has often been said that Jeffrey Archer's career is reflected in his fiction--or, in some cases, that his fiction is reflected in his career. Both have attracted a lot of public attention and have become the center of much controversy. A man of boundl...

A Boston-Brahmin banker. A rags-to-riches immigrant hotelking. Two intermittently interesting, mostly clichéd life stories (1906–1967)—which unsubtle Archer (Shall We Tell the President?) has linked up [in Kane and Abel] using coincidences that belong only in Italian opera and plot secrets that only Dickens could get away with (and did)…. So how do these two heroes—both of them tiresomely brilliant and decent—hook up? Well, there's a brief teasing glimpse of ...

["Kane and Abel"] is a family saga that is overweight but undernourished. Jeffrey Archer, a former British M.P., is a writer unskilled at showing you how things are. He merely tells you what they are. (Florentyna "put on the prettiest dress." Anne Kane "enjoyed a light lunch.") Descriptions that don't describe contribute an air of staleness to the atmosphere. In this thin climate, Abel crosses the sea to America and becomes a hotel baron. (He names each hotel...

Kane and Abel is … [about survival over a long time-span] involving two principals—a Boston banker named William Kane, and a Polish immigrant to the US, one Abel Rosnovski…. Inhabitants of different social worlds, their paths cross initially when Kane's bank withdraws crucial support for the first American who gave Abel a break, thereby triggering off the benefactor's suicide. For this, Kane is never forgiven, and is thereafter pursued by the Pole through thick and thin in...