“It’s a big world out there,” our narrator tells us. So it is, and while you wouldn’t want to live in this corner of it,...
Snowmobile chases, cigarettes and snub noses: Canadian novelist Davidson’s (The Fighter, 2007, etc.) latest is a down-and-dirty look at life on the quiet side of Niagara Falls.
Canadians are reserved, polite and law-abiding, non? Not so. Davidson opens as if with a country song, as Duncan Diggs is preparing to leave prison after 2,912 nights, of which “two were the longest: the first and the last.” Even if the prison is glad to see him gone, and even if he makes a halfhearted vow to get things right this time, Dunk can’t help but be a screw-up; he’s a jailbird now—“a distance had settled into his eyes,” our narrator says—and about the first thing he does is look for fresh trouble. He finds it. How could he not in a town where everyone’s high on bath salts or malt liquor, where the only growth industries are bare-knuckle boxing and petty crime? Dunk aims to improve his lot with a slightly better class of criminal, a reservation rat who runs counterfeit cigarettes from one side of the Niagara River to the other, grabbing at whatever other illicit opportunities present themselves. If Dunk is somewhat one-dimensional and elements of Davidson’s storyline are predictable—of course his childhood friend is going to be a cop, of course they’re both going to have their eye on the same woman, of course things aren’t going to end well—criminal mastermind Lemmy Drinkwater is a fully rounded hoot. It stands to reason, too, that any character named Bovine is a font of comic possibilities, if not ones for the squeamish. The story goes on a few beats too long, especially its protracted conclusion. Still, the icy chase scene that brings things to a head is worthy of Hitchcock, and Davidson’s writing is assured and nuanced even while giving tough-guy noir a good working over.
“It’s a big world out there,” our narrator tells us. So it is, and while you wouldn’t want to live in this corner of it, it’s well worth a visit.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-55597-674-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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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