Dorrestein is a potent writer, but, despite some splendid moments, this is a disappointing successor to A Heart of Stone.
An intense domestic thriller in which a beloved only child’s death destroys an already shaky marriage.
The bestselling Dutch author (A Heart of Stone, 2001) tells her story largely through numerous discrete flashbacks, ones that reveal both the protected childhood of Jem Vermeer, later murdered in a disco at the age of 15, and the early years of Jem’s distraught stepfather Phinus, who was orphaned young and raised by two eccentric maiden aunts. In the present action, Phinus (who works for a company that produces board games and puzzles) and his wife Franka (Jem’s mother) have embarked on a country weekend trip. Before it’s over, they’ll encounter a pair of menacing teenaged girls, Phinus’s carefully repressed destructive emotions will surface, and long-festering tensions between him and Franka that date from Jem’s death will push them further apart. Dorrestein’s taut prose and firm concentration on her characters’ guilts and fears create several memorable confrontations between warmhearted, impulsive Franka (a social worker sustained by her faith that sociopaths are redeemable) and introverted, secretive Phinus (who knows Jem’s death could have been avoided). And flashbacks to the trial of Jem’s killer (a wretchedly unstable boy) and its aftermath are chilling in their reportorial sparseness and clarity. But Without Mercy evolves into excessive melodramatic contrivance, involving the aforementioned adolescent girls (unconvincingly portrayed as, simultaneously, callous adventuresses and frightened kids), and also—in a scarcely credible sequence—Jem’s girlfriend Sanne, who has turned to Phinus for comfort. Virtually none of the story’s later plot developments have any of the power of the fragmentary glimpses Dorrestein gives us of Jem’s unruly charm, of Phinus’s boyhood yearning to belong to a family, and of the pathos inherent in the fate of each. The overall impression thus given is of an opportunity missed.
Dorrestein is a potent writer, but, despite some splendid moments, this is a disappointing successor to A Heart of Stone.Pub Date: July 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03188-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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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