Unsatisfying as a novel, but the observations are piquant enough to make for an enjoyable read.
Part novel, part cultural travelogue, this latest from the British critic and novelist (The Ongoing Moment, 2005, etc.) consists of two sections, linked by the narrator’s sensibility.
Jeff Atman is on his way to Venice. The 45-year-old Londoner, a freelance journalist, has been assigned to cover the 2003 Biennale for an arts magazine. Narrator Jeff is not a big player in the art world, though he’s a familiar face on the circuit as he pursues his favorite things: drinking, drugs, parties and hitting on younger women (he’s divorced). The Biennale provides “magical excess.” The parties are nonstop; the bellinis flow and the cocaine glistens. At his first party Jeff meets the absolutely must-have girl. Laura Freeman, early 30s, is about to quit her gallery job in Los Angeles to do a grand tour of the East, including Varanasi (Benares). It’s not long before they’re having terrific sex and strolling the streets like lovers. Dyer’s dialogue is dead-on, but Laura doesn’t have much of a personality. It’s not all sex and parties though. Jeff comments provocatively on the city and the artwork before the lovers part, promising to e-mail. Then we’re launched into the second, less novelistic, section. Jeff’s latest assignment has brought him to, you guessed it, Varanasi. This holiest of Indian cities is the main character here. Jeff deals with the traffic and the unending demands for rupees as he explores the temples and the funeral pyres by the Ganges. But what about Laura? Gone with the wind, evidently, for she’s never mentioned again, a disappointment for readers expecting continuity. Jeff enjoys his new life of idleness, going native, wearing a loincloth and bathing in the Ganges. A more conventional treatment would signal a midlife crisis and breakdown. Instead, with playful nonchalance, Jeff fades slowly from view, like the Cheshire Cat.
Unsatisfying as a novel, but the observations are piquant enough to make for an enjoyable read.Pub Date: April 14, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-37737-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
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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