It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognized plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten." These lines, early on in Graham Greene's new novel, will establish What will be later confirmed — that the book is the best he has written in 25 years since The Heart of the Matter. It is set in one of those dusty backwaters which is such a fine terrain for his talent — an Argentinian province where marginal survivors en route to becoming burnt-out cases live with their failed expectations, with betrayal of one kind or another, with default — all those constants of the Greene novel. And somewhere between machismo — a reiterated word and concept here extended to mean life — and death, the possibilities of God and love may exist even where the interlining of comforts they provide is thin. Greene here, via one of his lapsed priests, is more articulate on the subject of God in our day and doubting age than he has been in years: "The God I believe in must be responsible for all the evil as well as for all the saints. He has to be a God made in our image with a night-side as well as a day-side... God is suffering the same evolution that we are, but perhaps with more pain." Along with God, absurdity is everpresent (not the antics of The Comedians or Travels with My Aunt), initially manifest when one of the three Englishmen on the scene, Fortnum, the Honorable Consul, is kidnapped by mistake. His steadily tippling existence, ("always two drinks under par"), as empty as his bogus title, has now achieved some meaning — he has married a young girl out of a brothel and is about to become a father. He has found someone to love. The second pillar of the community is a Doctor of Letters who eats a great deal as if to fill some unappeasable void. And the third is a Doctor Plarr who ministers to the poor, to Fortnum's wife, and who is involved with the revolutionaries through an old friend and has hope of retrieving his long-disappeared father. He is now the intercessor as Fortnum lies in their hands — waiting to be shot, or released? Greene's novel is intensely involving in the conflicts which take place on more than one level, worldly and humane at the same time, and — as might be expected — unerring in its vistas of crumbling stucco and mud barrios to perhaps only a room with a view opening on a "dusty palm and a dead fountain." When Greene writes as splendidly as he does here, we are reminded that he has no equivalent.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1973
ISBN: 0143105558
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1973
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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