Brilliant, richly conceived, and perfectly narrated with the suspense of a good thriller.
Glasgow-born writer McCabe debuts here with a haunting novel of love and deception set in rural 19th-century Ireland.
On May 3, 1883, Elizabeth Winters awakes to face a day destined to be far from ordinary. She begins by reading a chemist’s manual describing the effects of poisons, then checks to see which she has in stock. A young beauty of 23, Beth lives with her Protestant father Billy Winters. Actually, Billy isn’t really her father, although it was some time after he married the late Catherine Maguire that he became aware of the fact. A well-to-do landlord, Billy comes from a family that invaded Ireland with the king’s men 300 years ago and put Catholics like the Maguires off their own land. His wife, whose family tree went back much farther, looked down on him until the day she died, and his daughter has ample cause to hold him in the lowest esteem herself. Beth has made up her mind to run away with Liam Ward, one of her father’s tenants, who is secretly involved with the Fenian cell that recently assassinated the British viceroy in Dublin. She’s told Liam about a trunk of gold hidden in the house, and so the two of them figure that in two days’ time they can be on a ship bound for America and a new life together. But Billy has recently been visited by a secret government agent from Dublin who asked some very pointed questions about Liam and, hoping to turn him into an informer, let on that there were some unsavory rumors circulating about the precise nature of Billy’s relations with Beth. Straight answers are notoriously hard to come by in Ireland, but deceptions on this scale could hardly be looked for in Dante’s Florence. How easy is it to be caught in someone else’s net when you are still casting your own?
Brilliant, richly conceived, and perfectly narrated with the suspense of a good thriller.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58234-237-7
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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