Vividly suggestive and filled with haunting images, though probably best appreciated by readers with a strong taste for the...
A missing persons case is merely the starting point for Scottish writer MacInnes’ mind-bending debut, which takes impersonation, infection, and simulation as its metaphors for the unstable nature of reality.
An unnamed police inspector is called out of retirement to investigate the disappearance of a man named Carlos from a family dinner at a restaurant in an unspecified city somewhere in Latin America. A series of early discoveries rapidly signals that things are not what they appear. The grieving mother the inspector thought he was interviewing turns out to be “employed by the mother to speak on her behalf.” The financial institution where Carlos worked—“in the process of a large and complex merger, leaving it for the moment without a name”—populates its office with pretend workers from a “performance agency” to make a good impression on prospective clients. “Trust me,” the agency’s director tells the inspector, “they appear much more convincing in the role of hard-working employees than such employees do themselves.” At first, it seems that all this play-acting screens a sinister mystery that could actually be solved: the corporation has been sued by activists claiming it has illegally occupied land belonging to indigenous peoples illegally resettled, and the inspector follows this trail into the country’s rain-forest interior. There, however, reality and the inspector come completely unglued—a development forecast by a chapter bluntly subtitled “Suspicions, Rumours, Links,” which offers multiple explanations for Carlos’ disappearance and many other puzzles while making it obvious that all explanations are provisional and suspect. MacInnes skillfully creates an atmosphere of lowering menace, aided by excerpts from an enigmatic anthropological text, Tribes of the Southern Interior, while deft satires of forensic analysis and ecotourism keep the tone from getting too misty. The inspector is the only person drawn with any depth, but characterization isn’t the point in a narrative that aims to unsettle and provoke.
Vividly suggestive and filled with haunting images, though probably best appreciated by readers with a strong taste for the avant-garde.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61219-685-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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