As such, it commands some interest. As a novel, it’s redundant and inert.
The veteran British author’s 15th novel is a discursive meditation characterized by signature strengths and weaknesses familiar from such predecessors as Hopeful Monsters (1991), The Hesperides Tree (2001) and Inventing God (2003).
It’s the first-person narrative of an unnamed British intellectual, formerly an anthropologist with a special interest in linguistics, who has made himself both famous and reviled for his stinging public denunciations of American imperialism. Arriving in New York City one year after 9/11, for a television interview, he’s seriously injured in a hit-and-run accident (though he believes the van that nearly killed him was a CIA vehicle). Presiding thereafter over the imminent demise of western civilization from his hospital bed, he’s visited by his first and second wives, and the adult son who’s making do as an employee of wife #1’s boyfriend, a powerful drug kingpin. Conversations, monologues and flashbacks emphasize the narrator’s bemusement over the mysteriousness of human beings (nicely encapsulated in a terrific little parable about a search for a set of missing keys), and his rather unoriginal conclusion that language is used by humans to conceal as well as understand themselves. This is arguably an unwise emphasis in a novel that’s composed much more of language than of characters and incidents. Only in memories of the narrator’s brief relationships with a teenaged Iranian girl and a woman who lost a leg to a landmine, in Africa, and in concluding encounters that follow his return to England, does this story’s resolute disdain for specificity yield to a focus on real human experience. The book is filled with crisp, graceful sentences and a smothering sense of last things approaching. In fact, Mosley, now in his 80s, appears to be offering a kind of summing-up.
As such, it commands some interest. As a novel, it’s redundant and inert.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2006
ISBN: 1-56478-407-X
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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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