An intriguing concept poorly executed.
A marine scientist quits a rocky marriage to hang out with seals in this faltering debut from a British author.
They married young, in Scotland, a striking couple. Leo Kemp, an Australian, was making his mark at the university with his research on sea mammals; the Scottish Margot was a beautiful schoolteacher. Now, in 2008, 16 years later, Leo’s career has prospered but their marriage has frayed. They’ve been living for several years on Cape Cod, where Leo lectures at a prestigious institute. Margot has never forgiven her husband for taking their son Julian on a seal-watching trip which resulted in his accidental death. All that keeps them together is their teenage daughter Sam. On a field trip with his postgraduate students to record underwater conversations among seals, Leo is swept overboard by a freak wave. A strong swimmer, he makes it to a sandbank, but realizes he does not want to be rescued. For what? The institute has just dismissed him over an outspoken interview in a local paper (he was never a team player). Margot and Sam no longer have meaning for him; he would rather swim with seals by day, sleep in the dunes by night. MacManus is not writing a survivalist story, for Leo manages quite well on a diet of mussels, crabs and seaweed, drinking from freshwater ponds. Is this, then, more an existential drama, investigating misanthropy? No again. When Leo asks himself what he’s doing with the seals, he has no answer. What is plain is that the author is more comfortable writing about seals than humans. About seals, he is clear and authoritative; he holds our interest. His humans, though, are shopworn, talking in clichés. Margot, pleased to be rid of her mate, prepares to return to Scotland, then has an unconvincing change of heart. Leo will eventually be found, but his extraordinary time out will remain unilluminated.
An intriguing concept poorly executed.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-64847-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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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