A short story’s worth of incident floated on a prickly cushion of aphorism.
A Scottish painter meets his English mentor and former friend after many years, in this poisoned miniature from the author of the behemoth An Instance of the Fingerpost (1998) and The Dream of Scipio (2002).
In the waning years of the 19th century, William Nasmyth encouraged Henry MacAlpine to paint, shared his knowledge of the European masters with the younger man, included his work in exhibitions he was organizing, and subtly managed at the same time to inhibit and discredit him. Now that the insurgent Impressionists and Post-Impressionists William championed have become establishment artists, Henry, long retired from public life to the tiny Breton island of Houat, has enticed William to the island to sit for his portrait. As William poses in what he takes to be the foreground, silent as a Strindberg foil, Henry reflects on the very different roads that have brought the two of them to this spot at the end of the world. His monologue ranges over the moment when he first knew himself to be an artist, the shameful way he got money for his first trip to Paris, the still undetected fraud he perpetrated on William years ago, and his relations with the painter Evelyn, the prostitute/model Jacky, and the prophetic patron Mrs. Algernon Roberts. Until the very end, narrative elements are resolutely subordinated to an essayistic ramble on the themes of the artist’s vocation (the painter is “someone who prays with his brush”), the symbiotic relationship between artists and the critics they hate, and the artist as creator and killer. Though Pears’s epigrams are not in the same league with Oscar Wilde’s, his grasp of melodrama, honed on his seven mysteries starring Rome’s art-theft squad (The Immaculate Deception, 2000, etc.), is sharp as ever, as he finally indicates in disclosing Henry’s motive and master plan.
A short story’s worth of incident floated on a prickly cushion of aphorism.Pub Date: April 21, 2005
ISBN: 1-57322-298-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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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