Postmodern mysteries from Paul Auster to Martin Amis have generally been dark and despairing. But noted critic Bayley’s American fiction debut is lightly, brightly comic—that is, if it really is a comedy, or indeed a mystery. Three artsy Brits are in The Hague to stare at some Vermeers. Charles Martin, who teaches fine arts at the University of London, is gay, but he’s fighting his biological inclinations on behalf of Cloe Winterbotham, perennial gallery secretary, who’s straight. Cloe’s friend Nancy Deverell, who narrates the first half of this urbanely playful story, doesn’t seem entirely convinced that she’s a girl. Neither does the man in the hotel elevator who masterfully takes her (or maybe him) on his lap, and later turns up in her room, identifying himself as a policeman, for a marathon night of sex. Nancy compares herself to Vermeer’s girl in the red hat, who’s obviously not a girl at all despite her earrings. This coy bit of gender confusion is the signal that every melodramatic contrivance Bayley can spring on (and through) Nancy may be more, or less, than it seems. Has Cloe really been kidnaped by Palestinian terrorists? Is the elevator policeman truly a Mossad agent? Does he actually return to Nancy’s bed and nearly strangle her in her sleep? Finally—as Nancy later claims to Cloe’s friend Roland, who’s gone to the sleepy French village of Mouriez in search of Nancy and the possible significance lurking beneath the banalities of her cryptic postcard home—does she end up marrying him, preparing for still another dozen turns of the screw? In true postmodern fashion, Bayley declines to use the larger units of narrative to build suspense, and Nancy’s adventures with Roland in France manage to be even more delicately inconsequential (think Claire’s Knee with spies) than the intrigue that may never have happened in Holland. For readers in the right mood, a giddy dose of helium; for others, a farrago of tediously precious folderol.
Pub Date: May 18, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18658-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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