A treat for aficionados of local color and connoisseurs of street life and violence. And nearly 500 pages for everyone.
Welsh’s eight-volume novel (Filth, 1999; Ecstasy, 1996, etc.) is a windy exposition lasting two decades and detailing the lives of four Scottish pals who sustain a long friendship.
In any Welsh tale, there will be the matter of diction for the reader to make an early peace with. The author’s distinctively Scottish dialect, rendered with gratingly phonic accuracy here, never quite comes smoothly, making the novel something like a journey in a vehicle that sputters badly. This one is perhaps the most peopled of Welsh’s works (and the longest): the four friends Billy, Terry, Carl, and Gally are each given full treatment—childhoods, the lives of parents, the contours of early home life in a government housing project, or “scheme.” The four unite as friends and early on are involved in a violent rugby (“fitba”) riot where a youth is slashed with a knife. There are also, as the plot reveals, the neighborhood enemies Doyle and Polmont, lifelong antagonists. Of the others, Terry becomes an unpalatable small-time businessman; Billy is a successful boxer and afterward proprietor of an upscale bar and eatery; Carl shoots to modest fame as a musician and deejay; and Gally suddenly learns he has HIV. Flashbacks reveal that a week after the death of Polmont, he had committed suicide by jumping from a bridge, and this iconic instance of mortality stands as a focal point for all subsequent losses sustained by the remaining men. In their 20s, they’re scattered apart. Their marriages are generally broken and their children fatherless; they all threaten, as Terry nicely puts it, to “fade into gray,” into the shabby, grim world of their upbringing. An unexpected encounter with pop star Kathryn Joyner succeeds in highlighting the essential goodness of the men, and the death of Carl’s father reunites them as friends.
A treat for aficionados of local color and connoisseurs of street life and violence. And nearly 500 pages for everyone.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-32215-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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