By reconfiguring one of history’s most notorious villains as “a man of integrity, ingenuity, and generosity,” this...
The first in a pair of novels devoted to Roman Emperor Nero—the one blamed for fiddling while Rome burned—offers a new take on an age-old reputation.
Insane, cruel, a sex fiend? That’s not the Nero who narrates George’s (Elizabeth I, 2011, etc.) latest historical epic. This lonely child, attracted to music, poetry, and sports and propelled to the forefront of history when his scruple-free mother, Agrippina, returns from exile, scarcely has clean hands, but neither is he mad, bad, and dangerous to know. It’s Agrippina who sets her son on the path to power, employing Locusta, a poisoner, to help clear the way to the imperial throne. Having disposed of her husband, Agrippina positions herself to marry her uncle, Emperor Claudius. Then, once Nero has reached age 16, old enough to take power, it’s Claudius’ turn for the poisoned platter. Indeed, it’s the women around Nero who seem to introduce much of the danger, passion, and excitement to this version of events. Admittedly, Nero uses Locusta too, to rid himself of a threat, and is eventually driven to arrange the murder of overbearing Agrippina, yet he’s muted rather than megalomaniacal and haunted by the matricide. Other notable female figures include Octavia, his first wife, ignored, then divorced; Acte, the freed slave Nero wants to marry but who spurns him; Boudicca, the British queen who leads an uprising that nearly defeats the Roman army; and Poppaea, already married to a friend of Nero’s but who will become the emperor’s wife in due course. On its whistle-stop tour through the years, George’s revisionist novel makes hefty use of its research, yet the emperor himself, shorn of his bad-boy reputation, emerges as oddly pallid, neither charismatic nor catastrophic.
By reconfiguring one of history’s most notorious villains as “a man of integrity, ingenuity, and generosity,” this workmanlike saga redeems Nero while simultaneously rendering him rather less fascinating.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-47338-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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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