A transfixing melodrama alive with crackling suspense, sharply drawn characters, intense historical relevance and ideas in...
The Booker Prize–winning British author’s latest novel is a tale of archaeological exploration and global political cross-purposes, set in the former Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in the immediate pre-war year of 1914.
When obsessed researcher John Somerville attempts to unearth a buried Assyrian palace that lies directly in the path of a German-built railroad line leading to Baghdad, rival international interests collide in the area of the dig (a mound known as Tell Erdek). British diplomat Major Manning, scheming oil magnate Baron Rampling, Somerville’s assistant Palmer (encouraged by his love interest Patricia, an educated woman committed to feminist advancement) and Somerville’s neglected, resentful wife Edith enact a dance of mutual involvement, estrangement and conflict that’s disturbed by two manipulative “outsiders.” American petroleum geologist Alex Elliott, ostensibly employed by Rampling but driven by a more complex agenda, easily infiltrates both Somerville’s activities and Edith’s starved affections. And Arab interpreter-factotum Jehar (whose name bears a sly echo of “Jihad”) works against his employers’ priorities, consumed by his love for a beautiful young Circassian girl. As tell-tale “Layers of Parthian, Byzantine, Roman occupation…[are] found,” Somerville anticipates scholarly fame for having deciphered mysteries related to once-glorious Assyrian kings. But much more is at stake than his love of the past, and as plotlines are skillfully drawn together, the ingenuous prophecy of a visiting pair of biblical archaeologists who seek the site of the Garden of Eden is fulfilled—as “the danger of human overreaching” precipitates a literally explosive climax. One hopes this rich narrative may inspire a film version enlisting the talents of Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott-Thomas, Ben Kingsley and their peers.
A transfixing melodrama alive with crackling suspense, sharply drawn characters, intense historical relevance and ideas in action. Absorbing and irresistible.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52007-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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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