An intoxicating look inside a world of innovative new media.
A bright, appealing novel about the early days of the BBC and the women behind its brilliant programming.
When Maisie Musgrave finds a job as a secretary at the new, and rather controversial, British Broadcasting Corporation, she’s grateful: Maisie is a plain, inexperienced girl, and in the years after the first world war, employment can be hard to find. At first, she feels out of place at the BBC; the halls are abuzz, the employees flush with excitement over the new technology. Stratford (The Moonlight Brigade, 2011, etc.) is wonderful in her depictions of that ferment, the democratizing new media which broadcasts information to masses of people: “From Penzance to John o’Groats, anyone who had a wireless and the license fee could tune in and hear a symphony, poetry, gardening advice, a thriller, a debate, scenes from new plays, sporting events, stories about places scattered throughout the globe, because why shouldn’t a farmwife in South Yorkshire know something of Shanghai, or San Francisco, or São Paulo?” Soon, Maisie finds a mentor in the brilliant and charismatic Hilda Matheson, director of the Talks Department, which broadcasts lectures on nearly every subject imaginable, from literature to politics to gardening. The BBC is one of the only companies to allow female employees to advance beyond the secretarial level, and Hilda is radiant in her prominent position. She’s also kind and exceedingly generous toward the young Maisie, who begins to follow in her footsteps. It isn’t long before Maisie is promoted and finds her ambitions expanding beyond the husband and family that were once all she yearned for. This depiction of female friendship and support is one of the great strengths of Stratford’s novel, which so capably describes its characters’ thirst for knowledge, for information of all kinds. But the book falters when it ventures into a conspiracy involving British fascists, secret meetings, and MI5. Maisie’s attempts at sleuthing strain belief. Still, the novel is so energetic and fresh, it more than makes up for its missteps.
An intoxicating look inside a world of innovative new media.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-47556-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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