Worthy company for work by other naturalist/novelists: Nabokov, Matthiessen, Kingsolver.
An elegant, eccentric novel of love, loneliness, and lepidoptera.
There’s plenty of clef in this debut novel by noted naturalist Pyle (Through a Green Lens: Fifty Years of Writing for Nature, 2016, etc.), in which a Yale-educated scholar of butterflies finds himself on a mountain in Colorado among grylloblattids, ptarmigan, and city-fleeing monks in search of—well, himself, for one thing, but also a species of butterfly that has made its home in the world there: “A minute tube of life,” Pyle writes of one nascent representative, “he sleeps on as the world of Magdalena Mountain freezes, solid and pale.” Erebia magdalena is the true hero of Pyle’s nature-rich tale, wanting only a little room to flutter and reproduce in the short span of life allotted to it. Complicating the picture is James Mead, our intrepid scientist hero, who confides to his diary, “All I want for Christmas is a Magdalena,” but who, in the spirit of discovery, has plenty of other questions, too—for one, why Magdalena Mountain bears that name. Answering some of them is the enigmatic Mary Glanville, a medical mystery: She’s survived a long fall off the mountain, has suffered a trauma whose “exact nature…is puzzling,” and now identifies with Mary Magdalene. (“I do not advertise the fact widely, for reasons that will be clear to you if you have ever been incarcerated,” she tells James.) Mary has fled a group home in Denver in a season and place where fresh snow falls on the old slush “like a clean diaper over a dirty one,” and on the mountain she falls in with a community of monks who just happen to bear butterfly-ish names like Xerxes, Oberon, and Attalus. Not all of them are on the up-and-up, leading to a craggy chase scene that would do Zane Grey proud. The story is a touch predictable at moments, but mostly Pyle pulls off some pleasing surprises, and with a butterfly-light touch.
Worthy company for work by other naturalist/novelists: Nabokov, Matthiessen, Kingsolver.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64009-077-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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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