Unsworth’s luscious history is ripe territory for a dialogue on the ever-present struggle against intolerance, a seemingly...
A richly imagined novel of the Middle Ages, filled with questions of race, God and fidelity, from the Booker Prize–winning Unsworth (The Song of the Kings, 2003, etc.).
In 1149, King Roger ruled a Sicily of surprising diversity—wrestled from Arabs not 50 years prior, the island was a peaceable home for Jews, Moslems, Greeks, Lombards and the newly conquering Christian Normans. Praised for his shrewdness in keeping this cultural mix in harmonious balance, King Roger is now bending to a certain pressure, one that is demanding a singularly Christian Sicily. Moslems are losing land grants and becoming serfs on their own property; Jewish cemeteries are being desecrated; and the sovereign’s Greek mosaic artisans are being replaced by inferior Normans. But in the beginning, this is all beyond the scope of Thurstan Beauchamp, assistant to Yosuf Ibn Mansur, chief financial officer to the King. Thurstan, an innocent and a bit of a dandy, had his dreams of knighthood crushed when his father entered a monastery, taking with him all of Thurstan’s inheritance. Thankfully, Thurstan, adept at languages, was plucked from the King’s guard by Yosuf, who is grooming Thurstan for a career of back-room power. Sinister forces, humiliated by their defeat in the last crusade, have plans for Thurstan and his potential to betray Yosuf in the name of Christendom. In the various intrigues of state (negotiating with revolutionary Serbs, delivering money to an assassin, spying for Yosuf), Thurstan encounters his childhood sweetheart Alicia, now a rich widow back from Jerusalem and promising Thurstan marriage, a knighthood and a place in society. While he dreams of the pure Alicia, he beds the beautiful Nesrin, an incomparable dancer he procured for the King. Yosuf tutors Thurstan on the necessity of suspicion—but too late, for soon, Thurstan becomes an expendable pawn in an international power struggle. Told that Alicia has been kidnapped, Thurstan is asked to sign a declaration of treason against Yosuf, forced to choose between his own faith and ideals, and another’s.
Unsworth’s luscious history is ripe territory for a dialogue on the ever-present struggle against intolerance, a seemingly inevitable human frailty.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-50963-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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
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
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