A mingling of financial high jinks and social satire by one of the most restlessly inventive of contemporary British novelists. Boyd (The Blue Afternoon, 1995, etc.) has found an almost perfect metaphor for the uncertain nature of identity in the Western world in the life of an insurance claims adjuster. Polished, bright, self-assured Lorimer Black spends his work life in London prying into the events surrounding calamitous insurance claims. Frequently he discovers conspiracies: a company claiming that inventory has been stolen when in fact it has been sold on the black market to raise cash for a failing concern, or a hopelessly-in-debt firm using a fire to bail itself out. Suave Lorimer, traveling with an attachÇ case full of cash, gently reveals his discoveries, gets the (most often hopelessly amateurish) conspirators to admit their actions—and settles the claim for far less than its face value. He’s a rising star in his business, but one relentlessly shadowed by duplicities of his own: his real name is Milomre Blocj, he’s the descendant of gypsies driven from Eastern Europe, and he’s pursuing a hopeless infatuation with a wary model, married to a violently possessive husband. The levels of falsehoods in his life (he’s even invented an appropriately old-school-tie past) have driven him to insomnia—and to the wonderfully named Institute of Lucid Dreams for a cure. Matters come to a head when Lorimer/Milo keeps probing into the curious events surrounding the torching of a luxury hotel under construction. His investigations, handled with vigorous detail by Boyd, eventually reveal a large (and believable) conspiracy set in motion by Dirk Van Meer, a gnomish, jolly, lethal powerbroker. Along the way, Boyd nicely skewers a variety of hustlers, from upper-class twits to the oily Van Meer to Lorimer’s zestfully thuggish boss, Hogg. His portrait of the hopelessly divided Milo/Lorimer is unsparingly sharp and droll. And his depiction of the manner in which Milo eventually reinvents himself, and defies the cabal, seems both right and moving. A harsh, witty, resonant novel, and an impressive work.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-40223-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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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