As engrossing as Lodge’s skillful structuring and bawdy badinage is, this time out he promises more than he ultimately...
Literature and science battle for supremacy in this three-pronged academic satire from Lodge (Home Truths, 2000, etc.) that gets in many a good jab before running out of steam.
Ralph Messenger is king of the roost at the fictitious University of Gloucester—an artificial-feeling, remote grouping of modern buildings and insecure faculty clustered around a man-made lake—where he directs the Center for Cognitive Science. Lodge tells his story from three alternating directions: the first is through Messenger, dictating stream-of-consciousness diary entries and musings into a tape recorder; the second is comprised of selections from the journal of Helen Reed, a recently widowed, popular midlist novelist who’s come to teach a writing seminar; and the third is through omniscient narrator. From these triangulated points of view, we follow Messenger’s wandering, carnal eye as he reminisces about his sexual conquests (unbeknownst, he believes, to his wife), recalls his numerous media appearances, and focuses in on the vulnerable-seeming Reed. Coming as they do straight from the horse’s mouth, Messenger’s recordings are the most nakedly revealing parts.But while their style is considerably more restrained, Reed’s entries ultimately prove to be the more interesting. The embarrassment she feels at her growing attraction to the arrogant, priapic Messenger (compounded by her fast friendship with his wife) is exactingly detailed and more resonant in the end than Messenger’s satirical antics. Lodge’s fractured approach works both for and against him by allowing the reader the obvious advantage of observing a tumultuous, secretive relationship from multiple angles—but it also sets the stage for a deeper story that never quite materializes. Lodge gets good mileage out of a series of writing exercises Reed assigns to her students where they write in the style of a well-known British author; they’re mostly beside the point, but Lodge’s carbon-copy imitations of people like Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis are priceless nonetheless.
As engrossing as Lodge’s skillful structuring and bawdy badinage is, this time out he promises more than he ultimately delivers.Pub Date: June 5, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89984-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
IN THE NEWS
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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