A tale of morals, intriguingly told.
A Faustian bargain drives the narrative in Irwin’s novel, but the devil’s identity is ambiguous.
In this 18th-century treatise of manners and manipulation—think Fielding’s bawds and beds—Richard Fenwick has returned from a grand tour of Europe sponsored by his godfather, James Gilbert, wealthy owner of Fork Hill estate. Gilbert assumed care of Richard upon his parents’ deaths. He’d envied the elder Fenwick’s bonhomie, his willingness to embrace life. Gilbert’s own nature was circumscribed and full of unexpected consequences. Now he proposes an intellectual experiment. Gilbert wants to "taste, vicariously, the pleasure of a young rake," and so he offers Fenwick an allowance so that he might pursue all that he, Gilbert, had so feared: "the Passions: Vanity, Greed, Avarice, Rage, Lust...." Thus begins the moral exploration, steps sometimes chronicled via letters between London and Fork Hill, with Fenwick and Gilbert slowly stripping away pretension and pretext. Fenwick is by turns ambitious, hedonistic, lazy, blind to evil and brutal in manner despite perceiving himself of "amiable disposition—certainly neither callous nor cruel." Obviously, Gilbert is Machiavellian, manipulative not only of Fenwick, but also of those to whom he offers patronage, including a failed poet, a lackadaisical scientist and another landowner, a boor whose wife he inveigles Fenwick to seduce. Amid Irwin’s spot-on descriptions of 18th-century England’s squalor and splendor, the masquerades and dinner parties, this passion play mostly rests between the sheets where Lust lies. Fenwick reports to Gilbert as he beds a promising actress while simultaneously setting sights on Sarah, a childhood companion neglected during his sojourn. Sarah’s now married to a stolid diamond merchant whom Fenwick’s eager to cuckold. Irwin’s secondary characters also fascinate: Horn, more gentlemanly than his loutish tavern-hopping would have him appear; Crocker, grossly obese, rejecting fleshly pleasures for beauty and companionship; and Mrs. Jennings, Gilbert’s contemporary, playfully cynical and sardonic. At the end, "the ceaseless reciprocal traffic between the intellectual and animal self" ends in accidental death and a surprising choice.
A tale of morals, intriguingly told.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-220235-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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