Brilliant, riveting, conscience-driven political novel: rank it with the greats.
Australia’s Keneally (Office of Innocence, 2003, etc., etc.) offers the most significant American novel of some time, much as Graham Greene in 1955 with The Quiet American.
The setting isn’t Saigon but the capital city of a Middle Eastern state tyrannized by “Great Uncle” and his secret police, the “Overguard.” Any doubts that Iraq is meant dissipate quickly as we learn that poison gas was used in a recent war (against the “Others”), that Great Uncle’s nation is under Western economic sanctions that cripple the poor and hurt all—or that one of Great Uncle’s sons shot dead two leaders of the national soccer team after they’d lost the World Cup. Desolate and corrupt, both city and nation are bled dry, oppressed by tyranny from within and sanctions from without—and Keneally brings it all to life with a gritty, uncompromising vividness equal to Greene’s Saigon or Winston Smith’s London. The central figure is Alan Sheriff, author of a highly praised book of stories drawn from his experience as a young soldier in the war against the Others. Indeed, life holds promise for Alan, whose first novel is almost finished, with already a lot of money in the bank from it. But calamity visits when an aneurism kills Sarah, Alan’s beloved and nationally famous actress-wife. In his grief, he deep-sixes his computer, then buries with Sarah the only remaining copy of his novel (it was for her, after all). Soon afterward, a summons: Alan is arrested, blindfolded, and taken to an audience with Great Uncle himself, who gives Alan an offer he can’t refuse: one month to write an emotion-arousing novel to be published in the West under Great Uncle’s name to stir up world opposition to the sanctions, all this before the coming G-7 meetings in Montreal. And so Alan wrestles with time, conscience, grief, desire, despair, and the blank page in ways no reader—certainly no American reader—will easily forget.
Brilliant, riveting, conscience-driven political novel: rank it with the greats.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-51146-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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