Unsworth returns to themes of greed and human rights in this potent sequel to his 1992 Booker Prize–winning novel Sacred Hunger.
Set in 1767, two years after that epic novel on the British slave trade, this is a slimmer, somewhat less ambitious book. But it still has plenty of intellectual heft; Unsworth remains obsessed with exploring the rationalizations and conditional ethics that permit elites to abuse laborers. Erasmus Kemp, one of the lead characters of Sacred Hunger, returns here with two ambitions: to receive financial compensation from the slaves lost on his father’s ship, and to acquire a coal mine that survives in part on the backs of child labor. Kemp is on the wrong side of history in both cases, but Unsworth doesn’t apply the modern reader’s moral certainties to his characters. For instance, Kemp’s legal adversary is Frederick Ashton, an avowed abolitionist, but Ashton bristles at the notion of equality among races; he simply wants black slaves to be free to return to their homelands. A series of lighter subplots run under that main dispute. Sullivan, a crew member from the Kemp family’s slave ship, escapes from prison and goes on a picaresque Grand Tour of England’s underclass; Michael Bordon, born into a mining family, considers a way to acquire his family’s freedom; and Kemp attempts to woo Ashton’s sister, even though their politics diverge. Unsworth’s knowledge of British history, from abolitionism to mining to courts and commerce, is assured and convincing, as is his ear for dialect; his characters’ places on the class ladder become explicit whenever they speak. The novel’s closing pages feel thinner as Unsworth ties together various plot threads, but the message about how much effort is required to effect social justice never feels didactic or unearned. A sturdy historical novel with fewer pages than Sacred Hunger but no less nuance.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-53477-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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