Fascinating work, and very much Flanagan’s best yet.
A whiff of magical realism and a generous abundance of expressionistic hyperbole create the uniquely suprareal texture of this wonderful third novel from the prizewinning Australian author (The Sound of One Hand Clapping, 2000, etc.).
The story’s set at an island prison colony in Tasmania, known as Van Diemen’s Land when most of its bizarre events occur, in the early 20th century. The protagonist and primary narrator is, believe it or not, based on a real historical figure: English forger, thief, and naturally gifted artist William Buelow Gould (1903–53), who is ordered by prison “surgeon” Lempriere to make a “book of fish” containing illustrations of indigenous marine life (which are reproduced at the beginning of each chapter); in effect creating a “taxonomy” of sea creatures. Flanagan piles level upon level, as Gould’s “bellicose book . . . ,” which scholars pronounce “the insignificant if somewhat curious product of a particularly deranged mind of long ago,” is reconstructed from memory by con-man Sid Hammett—who disappears once the reader is plunged into Gould’s garrulous tales of his criminal past (including a brief time in Louisiana, where he conspired variously with “Jean Babeuf-Audubon” and poet John Keats’s ne’er-do-well brother). Gould’s book grows ever madder and more enthralling, as he traces white Australia’s genocidal mistreatment of the aborigine population, and draws appallingly vivid images of such garish figures as the colony’s scrofulous Commandant, the ghoulish Lempriere, and prison storekeeper (and renegade historian) Jorgen Jorgensen, and retells the tale of “notorious bush ranger Matthew Brady,” whose “history” rather recalls that of legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. A climactic transformation, and a stunning Afterword that forces the reader to reconsider everything he has thus far learned, round off a triumphantly extravagant fiction that fully justifies its memorable antihero’s repeated boast: “My name is William Buelow Gould & my name is a song that will be sung.”
Fascinating work, and very much Flanagan’s best yet.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1711-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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