Doesn’t deliver anything it aims for.
From Murray (A Carnivore’s Inquiry, 2004, etc.), a disappointing novel set in a politically-charged Greece, mainly on the fictionalized island of Aspros in 1963.
It’s much more fun to describe the contents of the novel than to actually read it. Rupert Brigg is visiting Greece to uncover antiquities—even fake ones will do—for the man he calls Uncle William, but who is really his father. Along the way, Brigg meets a cluster of people: Clive and Nathan, a gay couple; Jack and Amanda, an artist and his promiscuous wife; the handsome Nikos, Amanda’s lover; Hester, the wife Rupert divorced; Olivia, who falls in love with Rupert but dies of cancer; and Steve Kelly, a prying newspaperman, as well as various revelers, diggers and double-crossers. In weak homage to Hemingway, there’s an astonishing amount of drinking and smoking. So let’s see…we have Greece, island caves, political and personal intrigue, art (and its simulacrum—see title), adultery, terminal illness and even murder, but it all adds up to very little. The novel has no pace or drive, no buildup or payoff. The murder doesn’t particularly interest the reader, and the revelation of the murderer is practically mentioned as an aside. Even Rupert’s personal tragedy—the death of his two-year-old son Michael—doesn’t give him much depth, and we don’t feel sympathetic to his coping mechanisms. We’re told how talented an artist Jack is, but the idolatry on which the novel ends seems misplaced. At one point Rupert seems to uncover in himself some aptitude for art, perhaps arising from his training as an expert in authenticating furniture, but with his usual ennui he explains to Nikos that he has “no creative urge. No obsession. No glorious dementia… No gift.” That about sums things up.
Doesn’t deliver anything it aims for.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1844-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
