A profound and satisfying read: the characters are likable, the whole hangs together.
Britisher Vickers (Instances of Number 3, 2002, etc.) again well mixes the metaphysical and the mundane as the author of the world’s bestselling book tries to turn the original into a modern soap.
Deftly avoiding either whimsy or preaching, Vickers sets her tale in Great Calne, a picturesque village in Devon with contemporary problems: drugs, alcoholism, sexual abuse. There, Mr. Golightly, CEO of a worldwide business, rents a cottage while he tries to write. He has a laptop and has learned how to e-mail, but he finds settling down to compose not easy. Constant distractions, some more welcome than others, come from temptations like the village pub, where, as a crossword addict, he enjoys doing puzzles with Luke, a poet, over a pint of beer, or listening to CDs with young Johnny, who reminds him of his own dead son. Johnny and a neighbor, the recently widowed Ellen, comprise the heart of the story. Soon after Mr. Golightly finds Johnny under his car (hiding from his abusive stepfather), the boy is spending time with him, fixing his appliances and doing research via the computer. While out walking, Ellen hears a voice from a bush commanding her to “tell them “ about love. As she puzzles over this, she shelters Jos, an escaped convict, hires Jackson, a local builder, and is questioned by Brian, a vindictive prison officer. When Ellen learns that Jos, who was unfairly incarcerated, is the father of Johnny, she heads with him to a place on the moor where Rosie, Johnny’s runaway mother, often left messages. But Jackson, in love with Ellen and in a jealous drunken state, has told Brian that he saw a man with Ellen. And Brian, who has secrets, too, forces Johnny to accompany him to the moor. With both Jos and Johnny in danger, Ellen acts. And a rueful Mr. Golightly, powerless to intervene, decides not to write an update—the universe, he observes, survives without him.
A profound and satisfying read: the characters are likable, the whole hangs together.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-21489-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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