Lush, inspired and provocative, this spellbinding dossier conjures up a bewitching Marlowe.
What if Kit Marlowe wasn’t really killed in a tavern brawl? What if he escaped and became the secret scribe of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets?
Ros Barber (Material, 2008, etc.) cunningly uses her own poetic skills to craft this startling chronicle of Marlowe’s life in verse—mostly blank verse. Winner of the 2011 Hoffman Prize, this debut novel adds a rich new voice to the conversation about Christopher Marlowe’s life and work, including the possibility that some or all of Shakespeare’s works belong instead to Marlowe. Barber’s Marlowe is a smart, witty, struggling, bisexual playwright. Through his friendship with Tom Watson, he is drawn into service, becoming an intelligencer, a spy for the queen. The dangers of espionage vie with the jealousies of the other playwrights, and Marlowe must deftly avoid not only detection, but also giving offense. Although Marlowe learns that the most dangerous secrets are hidden in plain sight, he resists seeing that his own professed atheism may be more hazardous than the queen’s secrets or his own talents. To save his life, his death must be faked. Worse, he must erase his own name from history, giving his plays and sonnets to a dull man named Shakespeare. With the force of fate, his dual lives as deceiver and dramatist entwine to deprive him of true self and true story. At points, the poetry gets in the way of the story, becoming cumbersome rather than nimble. Yet, telling the tale in verse is a clever choice, and Barber’s poetry is often rich with imagery, evoking the beauty of Marlowe’s own artistry as well as the mysterious, often ominous, world of shadowy political machinations. A spy’s code, the poetry allows Marlowe to tell his true story, reclaiming his own name.
Lush, inspired and provocative, this spellbinding dossier conjures up a bewitching Marlowe.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01717-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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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