Dark stories that are better at evoking than illuminating.
Nine stories explore the dark years of the late ’80s in Sierra Leone (where the author was a Peace Corps volunteer), when corruption flourished, the government broke down, and the country imploded.
Novelist McCauley (The Tuning Over, 1998) is an accomplished scene-setter as well as chronicler of the dispiriting relations between white expats and the local Africans struggling to survive the increasing lawlessness. The heat is palpable here (“the prickly heat was burning across my back”), the squalor visible (“a small yard filled with broken hardware, motorcycle frames, rusting bed springs”), and the people desperate (“Fouday’s wounds had been caused by his grandmother. She’d tied him, hands and feet, to keep him from running off to find his father”). McCauley’s protagonists evoke generic white men in Africa, disillusioned and cynical because their efforts to do good are thwarted by locals who bribe and steal to survive. In “Palaver,” Hunter is threatened with prison unless he pays a bribe to the police when he reports a crime, and in “The Turning Over,” project manager and pot-smoking Kelley realizes that all his work with local fisherman will be undone when he’s replaced by a corrupt local official. An edgy and insecure American aid worker in “The Mix” is responsible for the drowning of the captain and crew of a boat when he issues orders of his own, and in “Need,” the title and most nuanced story, Moody, though he thinks an educated young man is lying like all the rest, sells him some gasoline, which is currently in short supply, then finds himself drawn into the man’s life and sexually attracted to his English wife. In perhaps the most disturbing tale, “Hungry de Catch Me,” an African entertains hotel guests by stuffing his mouth with money and then spinning around, until one evening he loses his balance and falls.
Dark stories that are better at evoking than illuminating.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-57962-109-0
Page Count: 167
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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