A stylish, page-turning debut.
A masterfully told story of an old murder with a long reach moves seamlessly from the past to the present, from India to England, as a middle-aged Indian tries to learn the truth about his mother and a friend’s past.
Now based in England, the Indian-born Sinha (The Cybergypsies: A True Tale of Lust, War, and Betrayal on the Electronic Frontier, 1999) memorably evokes the contrasting textures of both societies in a first novel ostensibly about a true crime in 1950s Bombay—but in fact more about his protagonist’s own life. It’s 1998, and narrator Bhalu, a bookseller in Lewes, is summoned to London by his 76-year-old mother, Maya, who tells him she’s dying. In Bombay, Maya had been a noted storyteller and scriptwriter for the film industry; but as a young student, Bhalu was arrested in a police raid, and once Maya secured his release, sent him to England, shortly following there herself. Now, Maya, who believes that lives are continually unfolding and that stories never really end, claims she left India for Bhalu’s sake. Their leaving seems also strangely connected to the murder of one “Mr. Love,” a famous Bombay philanderer. Recalling his childhood in Bombay and the Amborna Hills, where he first met English Phoebe and her mother Sybil, a close friend of Maya’s, Bhalu also ruefully details his failures as a husband and as a filmmaker. Back in India he and Phoebe were close childhood friends who would explore the local countryside while Maya helped Sybil recover from an unspecified illness. Later, after Maya’s death, Bhalu learns real story about Sybil when Phoebe, unmarried and curiously elusive, contacts him suggesting that he read Sybil’s notebooks. From them he learns of Sybil’s affair with “Mr. Love,” her botched abortion, and the mysterious blackmailer who not only destroyed Sybil but also drove Maya and Bhalu to England. Returning to India to track down the blackmailer, Bhalu will finally understand both his own past, as well his mother’s and Sybil’s.
A stylish, page-turning debut.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-056246-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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