Thoughtful and interesting, if something less than a complete success. One hopes that more of this English-born Welsh...
An independent scholar has an obsessive interest in the mysteries of Shakespeare’s identity, and the eponymous Elizabethan society somehow related to him.
Protagonist Sean Tallow works as a news editor for the BBC—until a cost-cutting decision sends him reeling through a succession of unfulfilling jobs and unresolved relationships with women, then a reunion with his boyhood friend Dan Pagett, a no-nonsense business tycoon who’s always been loftily amused by Sean’s stubborn bookishness. Wall (Bless the Thief, 1998) works hard at making connections between the intrigues that Dan involves Sean in (largely consisting of illegally circumventing customs regulations). But the most interesting parts of the story are those in which Sean uncovers information about the “School of Night” briefly mentioned in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost: an “underground” group of intellectuals whose members included poet-playwright Christopher Marlowe, scientist and mathematician Thomas Hariot, and that fascinating, tragic polymath Dr. John Dee (who might be considered the Elizabethan Aristotle). There’s authentic mystery in the buried facts about “this glittering cohort of human daring and folly,” self-proclaimed Faustian seekers who had abjured the company of women and devoted themselves to understanding all the secrets of the universe. Wall keeps us interested in Sean Tallow primarily because Tallow is interested in these people, and keeps stumbling onto such delicious possibilities as the suggestion that “King Lear was effectively a coded treatise on the subject of alchemy.” The novel’s contemporary plot—albeit intermittently enlivened by adultery, smuggling, murder, and malicious satire on academic and big-business posturing—pales by comparison (though Wall does make several intriguing climactic linkages between Dan Pagett’s bluff amorality and Sean Tallow’s entrapment in his very own “Jacobean tragedy”).
Thoughtful and interesting, if something less than a complete success. One hopes that more of this English-born Welsh author’s fiction will eventually arrive Over Here.Pub Date: March 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28778-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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