Some interesting selections with a few real gems tipped in, but overall this collection reads as if it were assembled out of...
An award-winning historian curates this collection of 26 bits of fiction, essay and journalism about the denizens, grifters and debutantes of London Town.
White (History/Univ. of London; A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century, 2012, etc.), who spent the last two decades chronicling the history of London through the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries over three volumes, has now produced a literary companion to the city. Unfortunately for casual readers, he's selected a curious, somewhat dispassionate, and largely homogenous collection of little-known essays, most of which are long past their copyright dates. The collection spans four decades, starting with dire depictions of London gripped in the black heart of the Great Plague, only to rise from the ashes of the Great Fire barely half a century later. Some stories show that London always has been and always will be a hard place, as Thomas De Quincey relates his relationship with a teenage prostitute in “Ann of Oxford Street” and Henry Mayhew relates his exchange with an 8-year-old sex worker in “Watercress Girl,” both unnerving images for any Londoner who has been hit with that awful query, “Business?” The classics are duly incorporated as well, with entries from Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Graham Greene. Physician Frederick Treves makes for an interesting anomaly with his moving first-person remembrance of Joseph Merrick, “The Elephant Man.” Oddly, the second world war gets little coverage, mostly a nod from combat firefighter William Sansom in “The Wall.” Also, considering what a multicultural city London has become, the editor has selected few portraits of the city's current population. Dominican writer Jean Rhys deservedly earns an entry, as does Scottish novelist Muriel Spark and celebrated British screenwriter Hanif Kureishi. But anyone expecting to find the likes of Monica Ali, Mohsin Hamid, or Zoe Heller will have to keep trudging down the high street.
Some interesting selections with a few real gems tipped in, but overall this collection reads as if it were assembled out of cuttings from Project Gutenberg and Google Books.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-375-71246-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Everyman’s Library
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
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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