Subtle and perceptive, but offering little respite from a sometimes monotonous tone of lyrical earnestness.
Canadian novelist Moore (Alligator, 2006) conveys a widow’s solitude in a narrative composed of fragments and anecdotes ranging across decades.
When her husband Cal died in the sinking of the oil rig Ocean Ranger off the Newfoundland coast in 1982, Helen O’Mara was 30. Cal left her with three young children, a fourth on the way, and over the ensuing decades Helen soldiered on with a façade of equanimity. The book begins in late 2008. These days Helen has plenty of pastimes: travel, yoga, sewing wedding dresses. She’s having long-postponed renovations done to her house, a decision that allows her to share domestic space with a carpenter she lingers near but doesn’t much interact with. She’s also embroiled to varying degrees in her adult children’s lives. But her grief for Cal is still both torment and touchstone, the source of her life’s sweetest, most enduring connection and its most lacerating solitude. Helen’s focus is intensely retrospective, and the novel relies heavily on flashbacks that extend to that awful night in 1982 and beyond. Moore enlivens her mostly plotless narrative by deploying poignant detail; Helen is a sensitive observer, especially attuned to those who, like her, seem isolated and laconic. Though her life has been hard, the mood here is oddly upbeat. Helen’s loneliness began in grief and shock, continued in tribute, grew to habit, and finally hardened into identity—it’s not without its solaces, even its sub rosa pleasures. A quarter-century later, Helen is everywhere attended by her perpetually 31-year-old husband, whose body never ages and whose memory never fades.
Subtle and perceptive, but offering little respite from a sometimes monotonous tone of lyrical earnestness.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8021-7070-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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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