A small masterpiece, possessed of a relentless lucidity that recalls Conrad and Graham Greene at their peaks. Stone’s best...
Faulknerian intensity and a narrative economy reminiscent of Hemingway distinguish Stone’s bloodcurdling seventh outing (Damascus Gate, 1998, etc.), a tale that charts a midwestern college professor’s compulsive path toward self-destruction.
In a magnificent opening chapter, Stone introduces Michael Ahearn, living in Iron Falls, Minnesota, with his wife Kristin and preadolescent son Paul, and seeking the kind of “bliss” he intuits from the vitalist tradition in American fiction (his specialty) in heavy drinking and occasional hunting trips. Returning from one such trip, Michael learns that Paul has almost frozen to death and Kristin has injured herself rescuing him. This incident, and other indistinctly ominous particulars (a dropped flashlight, a slain deer’s carcass carried in a wheelbarrow), foreshadow Ahearn’s hallucinatory free fall, conceived as “the purifying effect of struggle,” but realized as obsessive infatuation with an alluring colleague, political-science professor Lara Purcell. Michael follows Lara to the embattled Caribbean island of St. Trinity, ostensibly so that she can attend a “ceremony of reclamation” for the soul of her late brother, an AIDS victim, and sell their family’s property: the Bay of Souls Hotel. Instead, Lara succumbs to the irrational power of the island’s voudon culture, and Michael—coincidentally an experienced diver—is persuaded to brave the depths of a coral reef, where an airplane carrying mysterious contraband has sunk. An ongoing island war, a “peacekeeping” military junta, unidentified American interests, Colombian militias, and various adventurers and burnt-out cases are the ingredients of a compact sulfurous melodrama whose working-out convinces the mesmerized Ahearn that St. Trinity is in fact hell (and Lara its likely agent), nor is he out of it. A perfectly calibrated ironic final chapter brings the story to a stunning full-circle conclusion.
A small masterpiece, possessed of a relentless lucidity that recalls Conrad and Graham Greene at their peaks. Stone’s best yet.Pub Date: April 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-395-96349-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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