A dazzling, challenging read but one worth taking on.
An imposing medieval mystery about a fearful religious community in the grips of secrecy.
In her fourth novel, Harvey (Dear Thief, 2014, etc.) has meticulously fashioned a historical mystery set in Oakham, a small, damp village in southwestern England, isolated by a river and buffeted by chilly winds. Its economy is weak, its villagers “scrags and outcasts.” It’s the year 1491. Wealthy, beneficent landowner Thomas Newman has talked about building a bridge. On Shrove Saturday eve he drowns in the river; the body is missing. Accident? Murder? Suicide? The dean of the local church, a man who had “a nose for the nasty,” has instructed John Reve, a burdened young priest and our narrator, to solve the mystery quickly and punish the guilty. Is Reve reliable? Did he kill Newman? Reve laments that in “desperate times people do desperate things: they steal, they lie, they cheat, they despair, they forsake Mass.” But this is no British cozy. Harvey has subtly crafted a complex narrative by adding another twist—the story goes backward. Reve’s narration takes place over the “four days of Shrovetide before Lent,” beginning on Tuesday, Feb. 17, and ending on Saturday the 14th, the night Newman died. Reve, as jury, will collect the evidence and, as judge, identify the killer. His court is his “little dark box,” the “crude and childish” confessional. The villagers come to confess their sins, some even pleading, “I killed Newman.” Reve listens, dissuades, and blesses—“Benedicite, Dominus, Confiteor”—with a “hefty pardon,” performing his “endless, thankless job, this one of serving God.” Harvey provides a wide array of intriguing, mostly pitiful suspects, each bearing some guilt, who live, Reve says, “in wariness at the whims and punishments of God.” The story is told in pensive, faux medieval prose, with chapter titles that suggestively repeat back and forth as the overall narrative inexorably, circuitously unwinds from present to past.
A dazzling, challenging read but one worth taking on.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2828-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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.
