Dr. Thomas More, Feliciana Parish psychiatrist, bad Catholic, boozy and allergic, makes a return in Percy's quasi-sequel to Love in the Ruins (1971)—and though the apocalypse seems just as certain now as it did then, things in this near-future seem somewhat calmer than were the earlier book's race wars. Euthanasia (both of helpless children and helpless oldsters) is general, AIDS and Alzheimer's patients are quarantined, and Dr. More himself has spent some time in Federal prison in Alabama for selling amphetamines to long-haul truckers (Percy's not one to put too glamorous a sheen on his heroes). But out on parole now, More notices odd findings in some of the few patients he has left, as well as in other people (including wife Ellen). They seem increasingly affectless, mindlessly well-balanced, given to specific information but not abstraction—and, weirdest of all, they are exhibiting primate-like behavior: public grooming, rear sexual presentation by females, etc. What's going on, it turns out, is a little bit of rogue socio-medical engineering by a bunch of local research doctors who are feeding heavy sodium ions into the drinking water of selected Feliciana Parish populations, and achieving spectacular results: no crime, no rape, no unemployment, no existential terrors, no alcoholism—at the price, however, of turning these people into monkeyish robots. And More—of the old school, someone who appreciates the up as well as down side of a good spiritual malaise—tracks down this Nazi-like experiment and endeavors to do something about stopping it. Percy has it all at his fingertips—the lovely character details, the ambiguous heroism of More, the fond eroticism—but maybe a little too much so: the thriller-like core of the book, tracking down and closing up the heavy-sodium project, has twice the this-and-then-that procedure it needs, half the novelistic shading; you get a sense of Percy bespelled by his own facility at writing low-brow in a high-brow framework. And like later Waugh, the comedy relies on types rather than on individual rascals (the exception is the wonderfully venal chief of the heavy-sodium doctors, Bob Comeaux). Love in the Ruins held together better, but a continuation of that book's specifically moral and at the same time antic lope is no bad thing at all; Percy fans will find it very agreeable, despite the thinness.
Pub Date: April 1, 1987
ISBN: 0312243324
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© 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.
