A thoroughly satisfying classic for those who love long, slow Victorian family dramas.
The Duke of Omnium’s eponymous children test his mettle by falling in with crooked gamblers, losing their hearts to commoners, and backing the wrong party in this newly unabridged version of a classic by one of the great novelists of Victorian England.
Poor Plantagenet Palliser, Duke of Omnium! His beloved duchess, the strong-willed Lady Glencora, has died suddenly, leaving him in charge of what today’s bloggers would call the family’s emotional labor: guiding his equally strong-willed children as they make a series of what he sees as irresponsible decisions. Although the Pallisers have always been Liberals—the present duke, in fact, served his party as prime minister in a previous novel—the eldest son and heir, young Lord Silverbridge, has decided to stand for Parliament as a Conservative. To top it off, after telling the duke he intends to marry an earl’s daughter, Silverbridge falls in love with—horrors!—an American. The duke’s daughter, the beautiful and virtuous Lady Mary, has also fallen in love with someone inappropriate: Mr. Francis Tregear, the Conservative younger son of a Cornish nobody. The late duchess supported the match, but she’s no longer around to coax her husband into it or dry her daughter’s tears when he refuses. Then the youngest Palliser, Lord Gerald, gets himself thrown out of Cambridge for sneaking off to the races and finds himself unable to cover his gambling debts. When the novel was first published in 1880, Trollope’s publisher insisted he chop it from four volumes to three. Now a team of scholars has combed through the manuscript and restored the missing 65,000 words, giving modern readers the chance to amuse themselves by guessing which they were or which they should have been: the endless fox-hunting chapters? The gravely satirical parliamentary scenes? This is the final novel in Trollope’s Palliser series, and readers of the previous five will enjoy glimpses of their important characters, such as Phineas Finn (of Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux). But Trollope’s attentive psychological portraits—especially of the shy, inflexible, honorable duke and of the ineffectively manipulative Lady Mabel Grex, the one-time sweetheart of both Francis Tregear and Lord Silverbridge—make the book stand on its own.
A thoroughly satisfying classic for those who love long, slow Victorian family dramas.Pub Date: April 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90781-8
Page Count: 840
Publisher: Everyman’s Library
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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