Superior hugger-mugger from an impressive new mistress of the genre.
History and mystery are engagingly blended in British author Mosse’s bulky successor to Labyrinth (2006).
Like its predecessor, this book is set in provincial southwestern France’s Pyrenees Mountains—this time, near the village of Renne-les-Bains (a nod to The Da Vinci Code)—and it tells two stories, which occur more than 100 years apart and occupy parallel narratives. In 1891, teenaged Parisienne Léonie Vernier accompanies her older brother Anatole to the lavish estate (Domain de la Cade) located in the aforementioned area, for the funeral of their aunt Isolde’s husband. Anatole’s motives are mixed (no surprise, as their aunt is young and beautiful). There local rumors surface that the deceased had unwisely “raised” Satan by means of a notorious spell. (Tarot cards become involved, and Mosse treats us to an entertaining crash course in their provenance and subtleties.) In a second, contemporary narrative, Meredith Martin, a graduate student in music, arrives at the same village, to research her biography of Claude Debussy (who had resided in the very Parisian apartment building that housed the Verniers)—and she too is drawn into the Domain’s lurid history, and specifically to the forest habitation denoted by Mosse’s title, once inhabited by invading Visigoths. Complications multiply exponentially and agreeably, and both heroines’ misadventures climax, smashingly, on All Souls’ Night. Mosse again proves herself a demon researcher (so to speak), and her novel’s rich brew of supernaturalism and intrigue is tasty indeed—betted by such vividly drawn stock figures as a minor character (borrowed from Labyrinth) who knows all the region’s darkest secrets, and a moribund gardener who mutters dark prophecies as alarmingly as did the late, great, weird film actress Maria Ouspenskaya.
Superior hugger-mugger from an impressive new mistress of the genre.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15467-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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