Johnston may be the best of all the 21st century’s neo-Victorian novelists, and this riveting three-decker is not to be...
One of contemporary fiction’s most memorable characters dominates this hefty companion volume to the prizewinning Canadian author’s 1999 masterpiece The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.
That novel told the Dickensian story of Newfoundlander (and historical character) Joseph Smallwood’s circuitous ascent to the positions of provincial prime minister and father of its act of union (or “confederation”) with Canada in 1949. Here, Smallwood figures only peripherally in an exhaustive dramatization of the afflicted, stoical and intrepid emotional life of the woman who was his childhood friend and enemy, soul mate and scourge and—oddly—his de facto muse. Sheilagh Fielding (known to all by only her surname)—crippled daughter of an embittered physician, abandoned by her mother when she was six, a prodigy of “mockery” whose sharp tongue found expression in caustic newspaper commentary on all things provincial and conventional—was the engine that drove Colony’s irresistible plot; the harpy to whom “Joey” Smallwood was, without realizing it, forever trying to prove himself. Her story begins here with Fielding’s retreat, during the waning days of WWII, to the uninhabited island of Loreburn, off Newfoundland’s western coast, and life alone in a restored house (whose provenance is a story in itself), where she relives her past, perusing a trunkful of letters, diaries and (acerbic and hilarious) newspaper columns. Juggling his materials expertly, Johnston constructs an absorbing patchwork narrative, which artfully reveals Sheilagh’s lonely girlhood, the scandal and pregnancy that send her to New York City and force her to surrender to the wishes of her remarried mother, then her unhappy return to Newfoundland, and further solitude, estrangement and bereavement. And on Loreburn, less removed from the present than she believes, Fielding is forced into a confrontation with the ghosts of her past that even this consummate pessimist could not have foreseen.
Johnston may be the best of all the 21st century’s neo-Victorian novelists, and this riveting three-decker is not to be missed.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-06491-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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