Hardy’s lack of novelistic skill hobbles her attempt to pull together the personal and the political, the past and the...
Kashmir is the setting for this messy first novel by a British nonfiction author (Bollywood Boy, 2003, etc.).
It’s October 1999. A coup in Pakistan rattles nerves in Indian Controlled Kashmir. The majority of the population is Muslim, and Muslim guerillas have been fighting the army for ten years. Even the unabashedly secular Gracie Singh feels the ripples as she totters around her houseboat on idyllic Nagin Lake, across from the summer capital of Srinagar. English Gracie, pushing 80, is the widow of an Indian aristocrat; her beloved son Hari died young in a car accident. A feisty eccentric, well-lubricated by gin, Gracie is the default protagonist, cared for by a mute, Suriya Abdullah, and her beautiful daughter, Lila. The Abdullahs are a powerful local clan; their effective head, Masood, is Gracie’s landlord and erstwhile drinking companion. Now Muslims are under pressure to be devout, and Masood has fallen into line, though he’s distraught when his nephew Irfan disappears, fearing (correctly) that he has joined the guerillas. Indian soldiers come looking for Irfan, treating the Abdullahs with contempt; the Major, a disciplined bully, hints at ethnic cleansing. It’s the novel’s most powerful scene; Hardy’s grasp of her material is less sure when it comes to personal relationships. An unconvincing young journalist, Hal Copeman, arrives from England to interview Gracie, though she’s not part of his assignment. He becomes her houseguest and falls in love with Lila, a woman half in shadow. The mystery of her paternity, her mother’s mute condition and their loss of status, from rich Abdullahs to lowly servants, will not be revealed until the epilogue. Hal and Lila will make love twice, and Gracie will have a lovely 80th birthday party before the lurking violence closes in.
Hardy’s lack of novelistic skill hobbles her attempt to pull together the personal and the political, the past and the present.Pub Date: April 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-8021-1822-4
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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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