Images here—the girls’ chalk drawings on blackout curtains, the flowers in the secret garden—can be breathtaking, but such...
A slight, chiseled story about a lonely horticulturalist who plants a garden for the Women’s Land Army during WWII.
Following Charlotte Brontë’s lead in Humphreys’s last novel (Afterimage, 2001), Virginia Woolf now takes the role of literary touchstone. Gwen Davis keeps writing letters she doesn’t mail to Woolf, whose lonely figure she once followed down a London street. At 35, Gwen is a sad case of isolation who likes to sleep under a heavy open book to feel embraced. Having experienced minimal human affection, she loves London with an almost physical passion. Unable to bear its destruction under the bombing, she volunteers to plant potatoes for the war effort at an estate in Devon with a band of young recruits in the Land Army. She leaves the city and her job studying parsnips at the Royal Horticultural Society on the same day that Virginia Woolf’s suicide is discovered. Although she desperately wants to bond with her new community, once in Devon she behaves at first like a stereotypical spinster, overly rigid and controlling; her inability to bridge the gap between her yearning and her behavior can be heartbreaking. In particular, she turns an unnecessarily prim eye on the fraternization taking place between the girls and a battalion of Canadian soldiers also billeted on the estate. Then she finds and begins to tend a secret abandoned garden, the Garden of Longing. Gradually, Gwen relaxes within herself and makes her first real friend, the intense, anorexic (though the word is never used) Jane, whose fighter pilot fiancé is missing and who reads To the Lighthouse aloud to a lonely soldier while Gwen listens at the door. Gwen also finds herself attracted to the battalion’s handsome, quietly alcoholic Captain, who recites poetry and has suffered a deep loss of his own.
Images here—the girls’ chalk drawings on blackout curtains, the flowers in the secret garden—can be breathtaking, but such abundant literary artifice keeps the reader at bay.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-393-05183-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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 masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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