An unusually literate historical mystery—the imposingly accomplished second novel from the Canadian-born British author of the nonfiction Brunelleschi’s Dome (p. 1261) involves a mild-mannered London bookseller in a scholarly search that rapidly mutates into a dauntingly labyrinthine intrigue
In 1660, widower Isaac Inchbold reluctantly leaves the musty confines of his establishment and travels to Pontifex Hall, the Dorset estate of Alethea Greatorex, Lady Marchamont. Isaac is engaged to find the only existing (unpublished) copy of a manuscript lost when the Hall was occupied by Cromwell’s soldiers during the recently concluded civil war: the Labyrinthus Mundi of Hermetic philosopher Hermes Trismegistus, a renegade work very likely a candidate for “the Vatican’s catalogue of forbidden books.” Once this delicious premise is established, King alternates Isaac’s tale of his increasingly convoluted adventures with others (presumably reconstructed out of his research) involving Emilia Molyneux, a handmaiden to Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, the Holy Roman Emperor’s librarian Vilem Jirasek, and the reappearing specters of three murderous black-clad horsemen. An “underground river” threatens the foundations of Pontifex Hall—just as Isaac’s safety, and perhaps sanity, are assailed by contradictory evidence interpreted from the writings of such sages and mages as Plato, Copernicus, Galileo, the cartographer Ortelius, “the Rosicrucian Brethren,” and other authorities. And he learns much more than he cares to know about Alethea’s scholar-adventurer (and thief?) father Sir Ambrose Plessington, sinister “art broker” Henry Monboddo, the ironic (hidden) meaning of the Latin motto Littera Scripta Manet (“the written word abides”), and enigmas surrounding the wreck of a German ship carrying “mysterious cargo” to London, and Sir Walter Raleigh’s ill-fated exploratory voyage to Guiana. Ex-Libris wears its considerable learning lightly, and its climactic succession of surprises does not disappoint.
Readers who willingly lost themselves in Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost should know that King has written its entirely worthy successor.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-8027-3357-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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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
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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