In a novel of singular complexity, Unsworth (Sugar and Rum, p. 481, etc.) sheds remarkable light on the nature of obsession, as a daft but supremely knowledgeable biographer of British naval hero Lord Horatio Nelson fights desperately against the evidence to rescue his subject from a distinctly unheroic deed. Day by day, history is reenacted in the London basement of Charles Cleasby, as he celebrates all of Nelson’s victories at sea on a glass-topped table filled with ships handcrafted to scale. Living alone and well-off after his father’s death, Charles has no impediment to the lifelong pursuit of this celebration and its accompanying biography, save one: He can—t explain to his satisfaction what happened in Naples on June 26, 1799, when his bright angel Horatio apparently defied a treaty and, using base deceit, sent hundreds of antimonarchist opponents, the flower of Naples society, to their deaths at the hands of their vengeful former ruler. Complicating matters for Charles is the fact that the secretary he’s engaged to help with his book, a no-nonsense, kindhearted woman he nicknames Miss Lily and for whom he begins to have some feeling, is highly critical of Horatio’s vanity and blood lust. After months of work on the manuscript—and an outing together with her teenage son to see Horatio’s flagship” Miss Lily reluctantly leaves for the summer on another job. The seeds of doubt she’s sown in Charles’s mind so tarnish his view of the man he’s come to consider his shining twin, his other, that he feels compelled to go to Naples in search of evidence that will redeem them both. What he finds instead unites him with his hero in a manner that brooks no return. Psychodrama and historical suspense align to extraordinary effect here, entwining the two in a denouement both stunning and unspeakably sad. (Book-of-the-Month Club)
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48652-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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