A persistently dour story that’s energized by the author’s command of character and mood.
A badger baiter and a farmer have an existential pas de deux in rural Wales in this slim, piercing novella, the author’s first to be published in the United States.
The fourth novel by the Welsh author is set in modern times—there are trucks and cellphones—but Jones’ voice makes its setting feel either prehistoric or post-apocalyptic. That’s mainly because his language and imagery are persistently visceral when it comes to both men they depict. One is an unnamed “big man” who roots out badgers that are illegally pitted against dogs for sport; the other, Daniel, is a livestock farmer whose wife recently died after she was kicked in the head by a horse. In both cases, Jones’ language is deep in the rank muck of rural life: He describes Daniel helping to birth a newborn lamb, grabbing its hooves in the womb, feeling “its fast heartbeat in the chicken-bone cage of its ribs, still wet in his hands from the grease of birth”; after a badger hunt, a wounded dog’s artery “was a fraction above the cut and he could see it pump thickly through the dog’s skin.” The plot is simple, building to a climax as the “big man” encroaches on Daniel’s property, but Jones’ language is the main point of entry here. Like Cormac McCarthy, Jones can make the everyday sound fraught and biblical: “The townsmen were not used to such darkness nor this level of quietness and they were not restful in it.” But though primal, rough-hewn imagery abounds, the novel’s chief strength is its depiction of Daniel’s grief; in his struggle to keep the farm running on his own and in his recurring memory of happier times with his wife, he’s a deeply memorable character who’s simply rendered.
A persistently dour story that’s energized by the author’s command of character and mood.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-56689-393-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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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