Harry Joy is 39, an ad-man in an unnamed Australian city, who while mowing his lawn one day has a heart attack and dies. Then, nine seconds later, his heart re-catches and he's again alive. But in the meantime, temporarily dead, he's learned a few things. One, that there are such distinct and immutable qualities as Good and Evil; two, that the principalities of Heaven and Hell ("worlds in the afterlife like layer after layer of file pastry") do actually exist. And, in fact, it seems to Harry that he hasn't in fact come back to life but that he has indeed entered Hell. How else to account for frustrated wife Bettina's affair with Harry's partner? Or his daughter Lucy being a Communist? Or his son David being a rapacious money-hungerer with dreams of being a drug-dealer? All these people, Harry figures, must be "Captives" of Hell themselves, "Actors" who've accommodated themselves to do and be dirty in order to please "Those In Charge." And when he returns to the ad agency and proceeds to dismantle it, purging the evil (dropping oil company clients, first off), these same family Captives promptly have him committed to a mental hospital: "Sometimes he saw, the doors had signs such as 'Social Workers' instead of 'Station Master' or 'Waiting Room' but there was, amongst the people he saw, the same melancholy one finds amongst passengers who have just missed the train to the city and know they will be marooned here for the next four hours." But Harry stays minimally afloat—thanks to the presence of a hippie and part-time whore named Honey Barbara. And when they're both released, she and Harry decide to go home to Harry's house—to brood and try to change Hell from within. Carey (The Fat Man In History) handles the impressive and unsettling situation here—the ethical reversals—with deft, cool talent, especially in a raft of very funny (rageful) family scenes. Yet underlying the whole novel is a rather simpleminded message: an ecological cautionary tale in which the villains—advertising, cities, cars—are knocked down stylishly but with little cumulative effect. The first half, then, with its sheen and style, may remind you of Walker Percy and/or Thomas Berger, while the second half drags and repeats. But, even if erratic, this is strong work from a big, growing talent.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1981
ISBN: 0679767193
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1981
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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