Kick off your shoes, lean back in your favorite chair—and make sure your thinking cap stays securely in place. The Music of...
A growing sense of intellectual excitement pervades this richly imagined and densely plotted debut, a worthy companion to such successful literary historical fiction as Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost and Matthew G. Kneale’s English Passengers.
It’s set in London in 1795, a time when England fears invasion by the armies of France’s newly empowered Republican government. Accordingly, Home Office clerk Jonathan Absey is assigned the task of seeking out French spies who may be smuggling vital military information back across the Channel. But that duty is interrupted by Absey’s obsessive quest for the uncaught killer of his 18-year-old daughter—whose fate is echoed in a series of recent murders of young street prostitutes. Absey forcibly enlists the aid of his guilt-ridden half-brother Alexander Wilmot, a homosexual choirmaster and amateur astronomer, when incriminating evidence points to the “Company of Titius,” a group of exiled French Royalists, themselves astronomers, and rumored to be investigating the possibility of a missing planet hidden somewhere in our solar system. Redfern uses this promising metaphor skillfully, introducing one vivid, suspicious character after another: emotionally deranged (and quite possibly psychotic) Guy de Montpellier and his dangerously beautiful sister Auguste; Pierre Raultier, the physician who betrays his own ideals to serve the Montpelliers; Auguste’s “silent satyr” and lover, mysteriously mute William Carline; secretive “spectacle-maker” Perceval Oates; young whore Rose Brennan, who may know more than she’s telling—and numerous other members of the un-landed aristocracy, the rival nations’ governments, and the Company of Titius. The story changes directions deftly when Absey comes to suspect that coded messages are being sent to France under the cover of an elaborate “table of planetary distances,” and a sequence of melodramatic climactic intrigues is set in motion. Only Redfern’s tendency to overexplain (perhaps understandable: the novel is loaded with specific information) and her rather heavy hand with expository detail interrupt the narrative’s breathless pace and delicious complexity.
Kick off your shoes, lean back in your favorite chair—and make sure your thinking cap stays securely in place. The Music of the Spheres demands an attentive ear, even as its multiple harmonies enchant and satisfy the senses.Pub Date: July 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14763-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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