A bit overlong, but, still, another beguiling display of the varied wares of one of the most entertaining and likable of...
A comic coming-of-age story with a pronounced sting in its tail: the Canadian author’s fourth novel, first published in 1994 immediately preceding his international success,The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.
Narrated in retrospect by Torontonian Henry Prendergast, it’s a chronicle of Henry’s career as a child TV actor, begun in 1967 with his enactment of the morally contrasting apian presences “Bee Good” and “Bee Bad” on the instantly popular kiddies’ show Rumpus Room, conceived, written, and produced by Henry’s take-charge mom Audrey. Johnston’s genius for understated deadpan hilarity works wonderfully in reactive descriptions of Rumpus Room’s inane preachiness—especially those spoken by Henry’s saturnine father Peter, a would-be serious novelist who maintains an amused distance from his wife’s busy conquest of the upstart medium. For example, his caution that Henry as “Bee Bad” is “a role model for evil people everywhere . . . [and that should Henry commit] any act of decency or kindness, . . . those who looked down to me would be forever disillusioned.” Celebrity, modest fortune, and sheer misery at Henry’s school follow—as does further success when Audrey maneuvers 13-year-old Henry into starring on the Philo Farnsworth Show, which imagines the youthful adventures of the eponymous inventor of the first television set. Audrey’s manipulations extend to Peter’s stalled career, and give the increasingly unhappy Henry “this fleeting notion of my mother fixing everything, staging my entire life without my knowing it.” Still, this is a comic novel: rifts in the Prendergast family fabric are mended, and Henry achieves a kind of liberation in a weird climax at Maple Leaf Gardens, attended by disciple-like Philo admirers who have named themselves “Philosophers.” It wraps things up neatly, and it’s a hoot.
A bit overlong, but, still, another beguiling display of the varied wares of one of the most entertaining and likable of contemporary writers.Pub Date: July 13, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-3197-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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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