Tightly plotted, briskly paced: in its admirable economy what thrillers ought to be and seldom are. For Altman (A Gathering...
A WWII spy novel good enough for a place in the le Carré tradition.
It's 1942; the British are on fire to learn exactly how Hitler plans to come at France; the Nazis are just as eager to disinform them. German-born Eva Barnhardt is the pivotal agent—which is to say the spy very much in the cold—in this high-stakes game of geopolitical Ping-Pong. No ideologue Eva. Recruited a few years back by the disreputable if undeniably charming agent William Hobbs, she's been working for the British reluctantly, resentfully, but quite efficiently—brave and brainy Eva an undercover natural despite herself. At this point in her young life, however, she doesn't see that either side offers much to choose from. She despises the Nazis on principle. She detests the Brits for personal reasons: Hobbs seduced her—a child of 20—made her fall in love with him, then left her to be manipulated by MI6. She's in Berlin now as the result of MI6 pressure—but also because the German Secret Service, having pierced her cover, is tickled pink that she's there. The Germans have allowed her to become party to certain troop movement information relative to the French invasion (disinformation, of course) that they're vitally interested in conveying to their enemies. Hobbs has figured this out, though Eva as yet has not. As the denouement approaches, the SS is stalking Hobbs, and Hobbs, who has belatedly come to realize how much he loves the girl he so callously exploited, is stalking Eva, grimly aware that he may have to kill to keep her from unknowingly betraying his country.
Tightly plotted, briskly paced: in its admirable economy what thrillers ought to be and seldom are. For Altman (A Gathering of Spies, 2000), an impressive advance over a just-average debut.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14837-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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