Superbly researched, quite beautifully written: a formidable first novel.
The complex effects of the Eastern opium trade on three generations of an embattled Anglo-Indian “family”—all painstakingly traced in this elegant first novel.
The tale begins in 1857 with the birth of its protagonist Hiran(yagarbha)—on the very day when his soldier father is killed in action during “the Mutiny” against British occupation. This fateful collision of events influences Hiran’s introspective, meditative nature, particularly after he discovers his ability to divine other’s futures by reading their palms. Basu’s elaborate plot follows Hiran through his early life in Calcutta, employment at an Auction House where transactions relative to the production and distribution of opium are made, and adventures in (the primary market of) China, where he’s caught up in the siege of Canton and barely escapes alive. The plot twist is Hiran’s “employment” by his Deputy Superintendent Jonathan Crabbe to “convince a mother to give up her child” and thus fulfill the vagrant maternal longings of Crabbe’s disoriented, opium-addicted wife. The dynamic of Western exploitation and manipulation of Eastern resources—and a consequent refusal to shoulder responsibilities thereby incurred—is thus echoed in global and personal relations alike, as the British attempt a dignified retreat from the mess they’ve made, the Crabbes abandon their half-caste “son” Douglas, and Hiran, who “inherits” the boy, survives into old age, still bound to obligations long since undertaken, and able at last to decipher “the mystery of the two Life-lines on his [own] palm.” Basu interlards his story with nuggets of wisdom from such classic Indian texts as the Upanishads and Panchatantra. And in the climactic pages, Douglas Crabbe’s helpless reenactment of the familiar patterns of appropriation, evasion, and withdrawal reinforces with powerful irony the lessons learned and not learned by his predecessors—as a young century, and further conflict and conflagration, beckon.
Superbly researched, quite beautifully written: a formidable first novel.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-75381-339-4
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Phoenix/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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