![]() In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. 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. The deadening atmosphere here, the external pressures which combine with inner weaknesses, all blend into a saddening and often compelling portrayal of deterioration.Ī retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch. In the years that follow Mary loses what little respect she had for Dick when she realizes that incompetence underlies his many failures she tries to leave him but is forced to return and in the last years she is shadowed by the fear of Moses, the Negro whom she had once whipped but who now assumes an increasingly familiar power over her which attains its full revenge in her murder. Pretty, girlish, and emotionally untouched at thirty, Mary marries Dick Turner, a farmer, is transposed to a life of bare necessities, loses her early restlessness to a later apathy, is only occasionally stirred by her hatred of the black boys who work for her. Its focus is Mary Turner, whose early upbringing by a drink-fuddled father and a bitter mother scarred her with many distastes, left her with many fastidiously unnatural responses. In monotones, this is a tragic story of emotional immaturity as it retreats to the borderline of madness, effectively projected against the sultry, faded, bleak country of the South African farming country.
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