An enthusiastic reception should await Ellmann’s third (Sweet Deserts, 1989, etc.), a unique hodge-podge of love, lust, and death whose protagonist has one foot in the grave and a lonely ache in her heart. Eloise has moved from London to a remote country house (bought from an inheritance after her father’s suicide) where she neurotically shuns all contact with the world. When she is forced to interact with, say, even just the milkman or grocer, significant recovery time is required—ranging from minutes to days. Meanwhile, alternate chapters are narrated by George, an ex-Boston baker now living in London and working on an epic poem about ice hockey—and looking for Eloise. Gradually revealed is the passionate tryst the two had earlier, when Eloise was on a fall foliage tour of New England. After being rebuffed by George, she withdrew from the world to live with her three cats while George went on to write raunchy rhymes about her and about the finer points of sports violence. The story’s second section offers narrative snippets told by a variety of curious figures, including Ed, a half-witted mail-bomb terrorist who raises giant vegetables for competition; Owen and Ellen, a father and his young daughter undone by the sadness and danger of life; the Evil Doctor who “killed” Eloise’s parents, and his seething Egyptian wife; and The 3 Old Biddies, who take holidays to steal novelty tea towels. All of these converge, each for their own separate reasons, in self-consciously literary Connemara, where the magic of love and death ensnares every one of them. Ellmann, filling her story with curious lists (of Nazi loot, the death toll of the Irish famine, the major catastrophes of Great Britain, etc.), diagrams, poems, and bits from failed BBC plays, draws from her diverse materials a poignant and witty interpretation of life as we know it. At once bawdy and moving, an unusual and witty novel that offers an unsparing examination of the complexities of the heart.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-19083-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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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