A failed attempt to weave past and present.
Four characters are tethered to the past in this flaccid memory piece, the fifth work of fiction from the Australian Jones (Sorry, 2007, etc.).
One fine summer day, they converge on Sydney Harbor. The cosmopolitan crowds! The Circular Quay! That world-famous cultural icon, the Opera House! It’s a backdrop but not a catalyst for a novel sorely in need of one. Two of these people knew each other as kids in Western Australia. They were clumsy but passionate 14-year-old lovers; having sex in an abandoned foundry is their most joyous memory. Now, 20 years later, James has sought a reunion. Unlike cheerful, robust Ellie, he’s a sad sack who went to pieces after his Italian immigrant mother died in a mental hospital. What they’ve been up to in those 20 years is mostly a blank. (There’s enough missing material here to build another opera house.) But we do know James needs to talk to Ellie about a girl’s death. Death is also on the mind of Catherine, an Irish journalist mourning her brother Brendan, her life’s formative influence. Why she had to leave her hot French boyfriend in London, exchanging her job with Reuters for an unspecified gig in Sydney, is unclear (more missing material). The fourth character is an elderly Chinese woman, Pei Xing, a longtime resident of Sydney. Both her parents were killed during the Cultural Revolution; Pei was imprisoned for two years. However, forgivingly, she visits her brutal female prison guard, now a stroke victim. The disproportion between deaths caused by one of the 20th century’s worst atrocities and the banal accidental deaths so upsetting James and Catherine throws the novel further out of whack; and a late attempt by Jones to link her characters through the surveillance video of a kidnapping falls flat.
A failed attempt to weave past and present.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00373-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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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