A good novel that very nearly became a much better one. This accomplished author has a few more steps to take, but looks to...
Civilization as we know it is nonexistent, but life goes on in Siberia in a bleak fourth novel from Theroux (The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes, 2001, etc.).
He imagines a planet, barely subsisting in the aftermath of global conflict and environmental catastrophe, on which hopeful survivors have received land grants in a frigid wilderness inhabited by indigenous tribes and “ruled” by slaveholding warlords. Such information is doled out sparingly by protagonist-narrator Makepeace, a constabulary officer in a virtually abandoned township whose own family, former Quakers, are casualties of “the Zone,” also called Far North, and its recent history of violent misrule. Makepeace’s loneliness is eased by the companionship of Ping, an escaped pregnant Chinese slave. She and her baby perish shortly after childbirth, leaving Makepeace depressed, suicidal and vulnerable to a hopefulness that draws the constable farther away from any remnants of order and into traps set for those still enfeebled by anticipation of a future. The novel’s first half is truly chilling. Its climax and denouement are, alas, clichéd, unconvincing and far too indebted to literary influences, most notably Russell Hoban’s brilliant dystopian nightmare Riddley Walker (1980). Still, the initial 100 or so pages form a superbly lean and mean survival tale graced by the authority of an author who knows the lands of which he writes and finds beauty and majesty in their punishing extremes, while precisely rendering their terrors. The figure of Makepeace, whose true self and the source of her strengths and weaknesses are revealed in a perfectly sprung early surprise, is not easily forgotten.
A good novel that very nearly became a much better one. This accomplished author has a few more steps to take, but looks to be well on the road to full maturity.Pub Date: June 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-15353-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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