How "the Troubles" of Anglo-Irish history affect life on one small island off the coast of county Cork is just one of the many quiet revelations in this thoroughly engaging, deceptively charming fiction by a modern master. Much of the narrative force here derives from the subtle design and the economical portraiture. Trevor wastes little time in suggesting that something dark and resonant with history will overwhelm the wide-eyed innocence displayed by Sarah Pollenfax when she first arrives at Carriglas, the "green rock" of an island lorded over for centuries by her distant relatives. The daughter of a penurious clergyman, Sarah enters a magical time at Carriglas as governess to her cousins, the children of the widowed Colonel Rolleston, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who, with his mother's help, oversees the family estate. But this is all before WW I—which claims the Colonel—and before the Republic of Ireland—which ends years of Protestant privilege. When Sarah returns (at the aged Mrs. Rolleston's invitation) to Carriglas in 1931, she begins to discover how many of the more recent mysteries are rooted in that "idyll of a lazy summer" in 1904. To her horror, she learns that her cousins, along with her brother Hugh, once played a creel game with the son of a tenant farmer, and that, years later, the revolution provided cover for the Catholic boy's revenge—a bomb meant for the Rolleston children killed their butler Linchy instead. The cousins, forever penitent, enact their guilt with rituals of abasement and resignation—Villana marries a boorish barrister much older then she, and her brother John James takes up with a fat old Catholic widow. And Mrs. Rolleston, ever kind and generous, provides for young Tom, the illegitimate son of Linchy and the Catholic maid, Brigid. When the family extinguishes itself through self-punishment—none of them produces offspring—what's left of the estate passes to Tom, himself the bastard child of history. The rich array of life on the quay, and the comedy of aristocrats gone to seed, make this otherwise sorrowful story all the more affecting.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1988
ISBN: 0140127127
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988
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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