An entertaining conceit, if modestly executed: More a mash note to memory and literary culture than a full-bodied novel.
An ailing novelist and actor tangles with the ghosts of parents, past lovers and a host of literary heroes.
Seventy-year-old Harry Chapman, the hero of the latest novel by the Booker-nominated Bailey (Uncle Rudolf, 2004, etc.), is fading in and out of consciousness in a London hospital with an abdominal ailment. Outwardly, he cheerily banters with nurses and doctors, impressing them with his recitations of Shakespeare and classical poets. Inwardly, though, his mind is a storm of judgmental voices fighting to be heard—the loudest of which comes from his late mother, a harridan with a constant supply of reasons why he never quite measured up. She has plenty of company: his shellshocked war-vet father, boyhood friends and male lovers both long-running and short-term. Also claiming the stage—and enlivening this relatively static story—are a host of literary characters and cultural figures, from Fred Astaire to Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse to Charles Dickens’ Pip to Herman Melville’s Bartleby to Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin. Each brings a unique voice to the brief scenes in which they appear, though they all serve to exemplify Harry’s long struggle to rise above his lower-class station. There are flashes of humor in the story, as when a fellow patient arrives claiming to have stolen T.S. Eliot’s false teeth, and Harry himself is an appealing narrator, sage but unpretentious. But the book is also hobbled by the limitations of its setting—the episodic scenes never drift from his hospital bed for long, and the story moves so freely around his past that it picks up little forward momentum. Those famous literary characters, interesting as it is to confront them, swallow up Harry’s real-life relationships, softening his concluding revelations more than the author likely intended.
An entertaining conceit, if modestly executed: More a mash note to memory and literary culture than a full-bodied novel.Pub Date: July 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-821-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
IN THE NEWS
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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