Significantly flawed, but very much worth reading.
Excrement happens in this impressively researched first novel, which earned its London author an Orange Fiction Prize nomination.
It’s a faux-Victorian melodrama, akin to such recent successes as Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith. Clark sets her darkly confrontational story in mid-1850s London, where William May, a severely traumatized Crimean War veteran, begins work as a surveyor for master engineer Joseph Bazalgette, who has been charged with renovating and sanitizing the city’s notoriously malodorous and pestiferous sewers. Relying heavily on period historical sources (notably, Henry Mayhew’s classic sociological study London Labour and the London Poor), Clark creates a graphically detailed vision of this hell just beneath earth. It’s a limbo in which the increasingly unsettled May slashes and mutilates himself, and where the novel’s most interesting character, “tosher” Long Arm Tom, patrols the fetid depths accompanied by his beloved dog Lady, scavenging for lost valuables and catching rats to be used as prey in the dogfights that are staged in London’s grubbiest watering holes. As long as Long Arm Tom is present, the novel entices and persuades with horrific naturalistic force. Its central plot—involving a murder in which May is a suspect, the malevolent machinations of his antagonist Mr. Hawke, the prison ship (itself a floating sewer) on which May is incarcerated and the young lawyer who arrives late in the story, and rights all wrongs—is, alas, another story: a peculiarly clichéd and uninteresting one. Clark’s plot would indeed be her novel’s undoing were it not for the genuine skill with which she rubs our noses in its ghastly ambiance, and for the wonderful Long Arm Tom, who might have enjoyed quaffing ale and swapping horror stories with Dickens’s immortal Bill Sykes.
Significantly flawed, but very much worth reading.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101161-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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
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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