A modest story well told.
A German bomb catches a husband in the wrong bed and sets off a string of discoveries that rearrange the lives of his survivors.
Jaime Gray was in the arms of his latest mistress when the war caught up with him. Across the park, his wife Ailsa was stirring up rationed ingredients to make a cake to mark the 16th anniversary of their loveless marriage while the couple’s 14-year-old twins, Margaret and Luke, were running home to dodge a rainstorm and the air raid. Jaime was not really much of a loss to the world. He disliked his wife and had little use for the children. But with his death went his income, leaving the unhappy survivors no choice but to accept the offer of Jaime’s brother Cal to bring them from London to the Grays’ Northumbrian mansion. Packing up prior to their departure for the North Country, Ailsa finds Jaime’s old diary and learns that her husband had married her on the rebound after an affair with Jessie O’Brien, a girl whom Ailsa had known well and who became pregnant by him but married an Irish sot. The relocation unsettles everyone. The twins, who badly miss their unloving father, don’t know what to make of their much more solid Uncle Cal. Jaime’s parents, whom he rejected when he fled his future in the family foundry, find the children unlovely. Cal’s tepid relationship with the only eligible spinster in the neighborhood weakens with the return of Ailsa, whom he once loved but who chose his more charismatic younger brother. Jessie Logan’s marriage is threatened by her son’s attraction to Margaret and the inevitable revelation that Margaret is his half-sister. If that all sounds over-the-top, it’s not. Gill’s unstylish, unornamented prose sets the old-fashioned story in a spare but sturdy framework.
A modest story well told.Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7278-6453-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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