A new angle on an old subject from West (The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, 1991, etc.), who here makes the familiar horrors of WW I the heart of a son's story of beloved parents. Clive, now in his early 50s, is engaged not merely in an exercise of filial piety but also in an attempt to understand—by remembering, reconstructing, and imagining—just what it must have been like to be Hilly and Harry. Harry, the son of a coal miner, met Hilly, four years older and known to be musical, at a bell- ringing recital in their English Midlands town. Soon a regular visitor at the Fitzalans—a notch up the social ladder, thanks to Hilly's prosperous butcher father—Harry would listen to Hilly, an accomplished pianist, practice and then return to his own loving but poor family. But Harry, sensitive and ambitious, received two blows that irrevocably changed his life: his family's inability to pay for high school, and his wartime experiences. Horrified by the carnage and the snobbery of the officers, he became a detached killing machine himself, maintaining his sanity only by listening to records. Then, blinded by a shell, he was nursed by a quirky angel of mercy who sexually initiated him, which later made marriage to the virginal and mystical Hilly a disappointment, at least sexually. He regained sight in one eye, but it was the ``Promethean-Victorian'' Hilly who really supported the family by teaching music. Harry obsessively relived the war but was a spent force, his only consolations gambling and music. Clive eventually understands that ``his parents had come into the world to use life a lot, in spite of vicissitudes and injuries, until they had had enough, and cried bravely aloud for a full stop.'' An affecting and pleasingly unsentimental tribute, though the story is often bogged down in repetitive detail and by West's need to flash his haute-literary credentials. A pity, too, because much here is very good.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-58734-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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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