SOURCE: “Pictures From an Expedition,” in Women's Review of Books, Vol. XVI, No. 4, January, 1999, pp. 5-6.

In the following review, Pool offers tempered praise for Master Georgie, citing shortcomings in the novel's contrived events and characterizations.

In her two previous novels, The Birthday Boys and Every Man for Himself, Beryl Bainbridge took her fiction in a new direction, creating a distinctive kind of historical novel. Like all of her books, these were slender works, not so much small as concentrated: it has always seemed to me that a Bainbridge sentence carries twice the information of the ordinary variety, and she practices a ruthless selectivity. But unlike her earlier novels, which focused mainly on individuals grappling with their lives, these gave her characters a wider stage: casting them as participants in a man-made tragedy symbolic of its time—Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Polar expedition in one case and the...