Overall, an impressive re-creation of a vanished colonial culture and its contradictions, but not a happy fit with the...
In pre-Independence Ceylon, an arrogant native prosecutor misreads the British rulers he reveres—and gets his comeuppance.
1902: Sam Obeysekere is born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), of a family that’s part of the colony’s elite. Maud, his mother, is a great beauty, his father an amiable spendthrift. Sam believes in justice, the British Empire, and, above all, himself, the firstborn (when he senses a potential rival in baby Leo, he wills his sister Claudia to smother the infant). By the time he graduates from Oxford and returns to Ceylon as a barrister, his father is dead, the fortune gone, and Maud has engineered Claudia’s marriage to Jaya, Sam’s detested contemporary, a philanderer and demagogue. But Sam is undaunted. As God’s gift to the courtroom, he knows the money will roll in, and it does. A judgeship beckons. Then the Hamilton case erupts. The murder of the English tea planter baffles the authorities until Sam’s intervention nets a suspect. Sam is a celebrity! But, alas, the suspect is another Englishman. Sam’s belief that the English prize justice over tribal solidarity proves naïve, and, though his career still flourishes, all hope of a judgeship is dead. Meanwhile, Claudia has killed herself and her baby. Sam avenges her death by banishing his impoverished mother to the family estate in the jungle, driving the former socialite into eccentricity and madness. Back in Colombo, Sam marries a plain heiress, Leela, whom he treats brutally. Throughout, de Kretser (The Rose Grower, 2000) writes beautifully, but her structure is awkward (we end with a meaty postscript from a minor character), and she kills off her characters at such a clip (at least 12 deaths, mostly violent) that we have little sense of evolving relationships.
Overall, an impressive re-creation of a vanished colonial culture and its contradictions, but not a happy fit with the domestic drama of the tormented Obeysekeres.Pub Date: May 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-73548-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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