Highly satisfying on many levels, this novel will have book clubs basking in its big symbols and abuzz over Tamara’s final...
Grounded by fog during a layover, a woman heading to New York recalls growing up in wartime England and the lover she has just left in Ireland in this thoughtful, multifaceted work.
In her ninth novel, the Canadian writer (Sanctuary Line, 2010, etc.) again taps her family’s Irish background. Tamara is one of a group of female pilots who ferry fighter planes around England during World War II. She then flees an unhappy marriage to settle with childhood friend Teddy in Ireland. A few years after his drowning death, she begins an affair with married Niall, a meteorologist whose County Kerry family is darkened by his mother’s suicide and the subsequent psychotic tantrums of his brother, Kieran. The unsatisfying relationship, full of long waits for short trysts, drives her to flee Niall for the U.S., when the clearly symbolic fog—see also the Eugene O’Neill epigraph from “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”—delays the flight in Gander, Newfoundland, and lets her ponder her life and the waiting room’s mural by real-life Canadian painter Kenneth Lochhead called “Flight and Its Allegories.” The novel essentially begins in that waiting room and then expands in parallel narratives about the painter and the brother while constantly returning to this former pilot, who wonders: “How could she, one of those previously forceful birds, find herself so essentially adrift?” Urquhart—whose prose at times flows from the same hand that has written four volumes of poetry—reveals her characters slowly, placing them within or privy to smaller narratives, vignettes, anecdotes that are themselves small marvels of storytelling and serve the several themes of love’s pain, family turmoil, and the elusive sense of home and place, especially in light of Ireland’s immigrant history. The Kieran narrative almost overwhelms with its powerful mix of sibling rivalry, Irish mysticism, and the passion of a first love. Yet ultimately, with Urquhart’s masterful hand, it fits well among the novel’s resonant whole.
Highly satisfying on many levels, this novel will have book clubs basking in its big symbols and abuzz over Tamara’s final decision; for when the fog lifts, there are two planes outside: one to New York and one to Shannon.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-22219-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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