A brilliant work.
Caldwell (The Rule of Four, 2004) makes intriguing literature from complex theology, weaving in a text lost to history, the Shroud of Turin and Vatican duplicity.
"I can’t remember a time when I didn’t live in the Vatican," says Father Alex Andreou, an Eastern Catholic theology instructor. Alex, as permitted by his Eastern faith, married Mona, but in the throes of postpartum depression, she abandoned him, leaving him to raise Peter. Alex’s brother, Simon, chose Roman rather than Eastern Catholicism. He’s now a Holy See Secretary of State, a priest-diplomat. Like their deceased father, the brothers yearn for an Eastern-Roman reconciliation, an achievement they first think possible because of Ugo Nogara’s scholarly work. Nogara rediscovered the long-forgotten Diatessaron, "a fusion of the four existing gospels into a single document." Now Ugo’s dead, and Simon, who found his body, faces canonical trial for his murder. Ugo believed the Shroud was brought to Byzantine’s Edessa after the Crucifixion, around A.D. 33, then stolen by "Crusaders who brought home the Shroud and Diatessaron." Too late, Alex finds that Ugo’s discoveries will damage Pope John Paul’s tentative steps to heal the Roman-Orthodox schism. Beyond the extraordinarily erudite plot and the details of daily life in Vatican City, Caldwell’s characterizations fascinate: Simon, "who can still shed the world in a heartbeat"; the anti-reconciliationist Cardinal Boia, "like standing in the path of a streamroller"; and even John Paul, paralyzed, nearly mute, eyes "[a] hypnotic Mediterranean color, a pelagic blue. They swim with life." While exploring Ugo’s death and dissecting theological infighting, Caldwell weaves together the Shroud’s passage from Edessa to France to Turin, the Gospels’ historical and theological truths, and Rome’s clumsy effort to assuage the bloody events of "1204...the darkest year in the history between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches." In homage to the Christian message, sin and salvation, forgiveness and redemption, love and sacrifice are chronicled from the personal to the universal.
A brilliant work.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9414-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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