Compared with this, Knox’s earlier fictional premises (a mortal’s love affair with an angel, for example) seem like...
If Anne Rice, Patrick White, and David Lynch had gotten together (unlikely, but think of the possibilities), they might have had a few drinks and concocted something like this crazily overstuffed fourth novel from the New Zealand author (Billie’s Kiss, 2002, etc.).
Call it magical realism noir. For mysteries begin proliferating when Australian policeman Brian “Bad” Phelan, recovering on vacation near the French-Italian border from injuries sustained while defusing a bomb, helps retrieve a drowned woman’s body from a sea cave—and notices her identical resemblance to a woman he’d met years before, in disturbingly similar circumstances. Things go quickly from bad to worse. The embattled cop seeks information about the dead woman, Martine Dardo, possibly the daughter of Blessed Mother Martine Raimondi, a heroine of WWII’s Italian partisans murdered by the Nazis. Even more confusing appearances (magnified by Knox’s turgid conflations of past with present) are made by Father Daniel Octave, who’s investigating Raimondi’s qualifications for sainthood; scholar Eve Moskelutz (whose specialty is the libidinous aristocrat Marquis de Chambord, author of the popular romance Daylight); the widow of noted painter Jean Ares; Eve’s twin sister Dawn, a frequently unclad seductress who enjoys biting other people’s tongues; the decapitated body of a former beneficiary of one of Mother Martine’s “miracles”; and a soulful vampire named Lou Ila, who knows the secrets most of these folks and their acquaintances and lovers have been concealing for years (if not centuries). This bizarre narrative impasto, at times as entertaining as it is certifiably insane, eventually does reach a resolution of sorts, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense—not that the battle-fatigued reader really expects it to.
Compared with this, Knox’s earlier fictional premises (a mortal’s love affair with an angel, for example) seem like kitchen-sink realism. What’s next? Waltzing Matilda as a punk priestess of Ishtar?Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45795-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
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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