O’Neill again proves himself one of Ireland’s finest writer.
The pastoral image of rural Ireland is roasted over a slow fire in this inventive black comedy, a 1990 novel by the Irish author of the 2002 critical success At Swim, Two Boys.
Protagonist O’Leary Montagu is a man who’s forgotten himself, after being nearly killed by a hit-and-run driver and having in effect been “born at the age of twenty-five” or thereabouts. We meet O’Leary as he’s traveling by train to the village of Kilbrack, memorialized in his favorite book, Ill Fares the Land, a memoir of its author Nancy Valentine’s idyllic childhood there. The book’s plaintive conclusion had led O’Leary to expect a ghost town; instead, he finds a reasonably bustling hamlet still occupied by Valentine’s characters. Prominent among them are an intemperate pharmacist, a delusional spinster tavernkeeper, middle-aged unmarried male and female siblings, and widowed Charity Cuthbert, who hopes to prevent her beautiful, headstrong daughter Livia from becoming a nun by marrying the wicked girl off—even if it’s to maimed, addlepated O’Leary. We sense that our hero’s hopes to write Nancy Valentine’s biography may go for naught with the introduction of Mrs. Cuthbert’s distant cousin, elderly recluse Valentine Brack, who lives alone with his dog Nancy and compulsively scribbles tales of his disappointing life and times intended to prove his morose assertion that “History ends with me.” O’Neill mixes these raffish elements expertly (throwing in for good measure a cupiditous Monsignor who’s after Charity Cuthbert’s property) in a roiling narrative that grows in depth and complexity even as its characters’ antics maintain its comic momentum. And there are hints of the Joycean dimensions of O’Neill’s later novel in the sure touch with which he makes the bewildered O’Leary a humble image of the wanderer reclaiming his history, the writer grappling with his material, and the son seeking his father.
O’Neill again proves himself one of Ireland’s finest writer.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5595-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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 masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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