![]() ![]() ![]() Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Ī young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up-sorry, can't tell you how it ends! Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells. 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. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past witchcraft. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. 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. 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. 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. This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. ![]() The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. ![]() A contemporary novel.Ī retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch. Unfortunately, she falls for the lure of the soapbox, unnecessarily, as her story would have done the trick for her. Others get hurt, too, and Ayn Rand makes full use of a chance to blast the forces of conservatism, of reaction, of compromise. Jealousies and hates and resentments cannot touch him, for architecture is his god and the little spiteful people who thrust at him get punished in the rebound. A stormy romance crashes across his path, fraught with danger and passion and disillusionment and triumph. She has told this time the story of an idealistic young architect, who refused to compromise with popular taste or accepted practice, who starved in the process, but who finally won through to success, as the foremost modernist of his time. Ayn Rand showed in the Living (Macmillan, 1936) an ability to handle groups of people and shifting impacts convincingly, with implicit drama. In spite of this excess of verbiage, the novel is a telling one - and original. The story would have been faster paced, the characters more sharply limned, had whole episodes, repetitive and tautological, been eliminated had long speeches been cut to hare bones. It falls short, as do so many modern novels, in the apparent inability of the author (or editor) to be a ruthless surgeon. ![]()
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