A slow-paced but often charming and enjoyable book about music, friendship, and defining success on one’s own terms.
Clapham’s (Odd Socks, 2013) novel chronicles the very different paths of two young schoolboys growing up in 1950s England.
John Haworth and Martin Holford are two unlikely friends who forge a bond at their primary school in Porterfield, “an industrial city halfway up England.” John is a quiet, gifted musician, while Martin is an unbelievably bright, witty young man with pluck. The novel traces their lives from their first primary school years to grammar school, university, and beyond. John stumbles into a successful music career by meeting Daphne Lagrange, a celebrated pianist who, through various connections, is able to get him gigs as a music critic, amanuensis, and accompanist. Martin takes a more public route on his path to adulthood, enjoying stints as a performative clergyman and “faith healer” and a recruiter for the local Northern Coal Board Symphony Orchestra. Throughout the novel, Clapham ties in the stories of other colorful figures in John’s and Martin’s lives. He adds complexity with people such as Katherine Clements, an ailing music star whom John accompanies on tour; Tamas Mihaly, a Hungarian conductor whom Martin recruits for the orchestra; and Wesley Johnson, an up-and-coming composer from the West Indies whom John encounters in Oxford. Ultimately, although the overall plot of this deliberately paced novel isn’t very compelling, Clapham’s portrait of a friendship between the two unlikely protagonists, which lasts through decades and various stages of life, is heartwarming and uplifting. Also, through various characters’ tales, the author makes a poignant statement about the subjectivity of success: even if one isn’t in the limelight, one may still make a considerable impact in the arts—and on the world.
A slow-paced but often charming and enjoyable book about music, friendship, and defining success on one’s own terms.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-7850-0
Page Count: 244
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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