In his sixth novel, physicist Lightman (Einstein’s Dreams, 1993, etc.) playfully bridges the gap between creationism and evolution by having the Creator Himself explain how the whole shebang started.
He’s Mr g in the title, and unnamed in the text, but known to the world as God. He’s been living and sleeping in the Void, along with his Aunt Penelope and Uncle Deva. These down-home characters, who squabble like any old married couple, provide a domestic background for their Nephew. It’s a question of scale. Though God’s upcoming enterprise, the creation of the universe, is vast, it’s being designed by a modest family man. First comes the creation of time, followed by space and energy, and then a universe, which He names Aalam-104729. There’s a rush of subatomic particles and atoms and a lot of textbook physics, well orchestrated. The key moment comes with the making of the molecules. Cause and effect, muses God, in enraptured passivity, the Creator standing back to admire evolution, which will lead to animate matter. Will His creatures have free will? That question is raised by a stranger, an immortal named Belhor who has been monitoring the creation. Way in the future he will be the Devil, but right now he is a stimulating interlocutor for God, who takes his question to heart. God learns even as he creates: the capacity of the mind is a case in point. Questions of suffering, and good and evil, are addressed, though not with the same rigor as quantum physics. Towards the end of this short novel Lightman appears to be running out of material. There’s an altogether too cute chapter in which Aunt Penelope gets a dress of pink stars, a whole galaxy; a disruptive visit by Belhor to an opera house on a waterlogged planet is just filler. A grab-bag of physics, philosophical inquiry and family tomfoolery that fails to cohere.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-37999-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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