A well-executed, intense tale of dark family secrets coming to light in a sunny place.
Two very different sets of siblings, one French, one English, seek resolution to their fraught upbringings and present discontent in this latest tale of intertwining lives from Tremain (The Road Home, 2008, etc.).
When his success as a London antiques dealer wanes, Anthony Verey, solitary but for his sexual proclivity for young men, travels to southern France where his sister, Veronica, lives and gardens with her partner and lover, Kitty, while writing a book titled Gardening without Rain that Kitty, a mediocre watercolorist, intends to illustrate. Anthony decides, much to the dismay of his sister’s lover, to purchase property nearby. His interest falls on the Lunel family homestead, where the Lunel siblings live locked in antipathy—the alcoholic Aramon in the filth and decay of the family’s once fine home, and his sister, Audrun, relegated to a squalid cottage beside the wood that is her meager birthright. Aramon plans to sell the house to a rich foreigner, and Audrun, tired of cleaning up his messes, loathes him for his mistreating his land, property and animals, but most of all for plotting to convert their home into cash. The proximity of Audrun’s cottage to the Mas Lunel is an obstacle to its sale and so he contests their property boundaries. Audrun wishes Aramon dead; Kitty has similar hopes for Anthony, who has proven himself an apple of discord thrown into their paradisiacal existence. As the dry mistral desiccates the landscape, tensions strain until, quite suddenly, Anthony disappears. Tremain sensually, intricately depicts the landscape, gardens and woods of southern France. The author’s latest is worth reading for its flights of interior narration and iridescent, vivid descriptions. There’s a solid story to boot.
A well-executed, intense tale of dark family secrets coming to light in a sunny place.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-07956-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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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