Historically sound, but without the sympathetic spark of the best historical fiction.
Overly busy novel of life inside the Virgin Queen’s court—and mind.
Anyone who’s read history or seen Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 bloodfest Elizabeth, with Cate Blanchett in the title role, knows that the daughter of Henry VIII was no one to mess with. Indeed, as George’s novel opens, well into her reign, Queen Elizabeth is sternly interrogating “the three most powerful men in the realm,” one of whom, Sir Francis Walsingham, is famously not shy of doing in the various opponents to her rule, such as Mary, Queen of Scots. England, Elizabeth avers, is the bulwark of the Reformation against a resurgent Catholic Church—explains one of those three, in a flat, modern and wholly anachronistic way, “It’s religious, but it’s also political.” Indeed. A viper in the nest, Elizabeth’s cousin, the vivacious redhead Lettice Knollys, has reasons aplenty to oppose the queen on several counts, not least of them old-fashioned familial rivalry, and George’s novel traces their long dance of fate against the backdrop of Tudor hanky-panky and an inconvenient Spanish Armada, the former more daunting and certainly more entertaining than the latter, since the Spanish fleet is all too quickly smashed against the rocks of Ireland. George tells her tale from multiple points of view, sometimes confusingly, and her prose tends to be without affect—or, for that matter, zing. In the hands of a master of period language, a John Barth, say, this tangled tale would doubtless spring to life, but as it is it’s all rather clinical, with intonations such as “It is in the nature of truth to have enemies” to remind us that we’re in the midst of important events. The tale is also nicely bloody and byzantine, but it goes on much too long; Hilary Mantel packed a lot more punch into Wolf Hall (2009), and in a 100-odd pages less.
Historically sound, but without the sympathetic spark of the best historical fiction.Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02253-3
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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