![]() 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. Not truly a novel, then-nor satisfying as one-but added proof of Barnes' deft skill for artistic and intellectual cubism.Ī retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch. Certainly the final section-Gregory's search for and the finding of faith-is very moving, a hundred juggled balls in the air, all somehow-wizardly, humanely-caught. ![]() Probably a better way to read this book is as an elegantly well-done successor (and homage) to Cyril Connolly's black diamond, The Unquiet Grave: an excursus, a self-mocking meditation. Her impressions of travels lo China and the Grand Canyon are intelligently odd-but, in a novel, sit there like travel notes all the same. ![]() This is all here again-but more pokily Jean's teenaged acquaintance with a scared fighter pilot, for instance, etches the fine line between bravery and cowardice-but too portentously. Barnes is special at subtle recapitulation he can under- and over-knot a mere detail until it comes to seem like a living seed and he has a fine, off-center sense of humor that falls toward the commonsensical and sends up the needlessly fancy. Her son, Gregory, inherits the deracination and, then, as a bachelor of 60 (Jean still doughtily hanging on at 100 in the year 2002), he decides to ask his own versions of Uncle Leslie's questions lo a great central computer that will-to a select few-reveal ultimate truths, i.e., Does God exist? Why is there death? As Flaubert's Parrot proved. Marriage, a son, divorce, travel-she goes on to have and do all these things but never feels herself quite connected to them. Also they seemed to have had the capacity to render her all but unfit for normal life. Jean Serjeant's childhood in the 1920's is bedeviled and enlightened by her golf-course outings with her Uncle Leslie, during which his charming eccentricity poses to her certain questions and conundrums (Is there a Sandwich museum? Why don't Jews like golf? Why is heaven up the chimney? Why is the mink excessively tenacious of life?)-mysteries that provide her with a kind of bravery and fear mixed together. Where that book had an aggressively sociocultural finish, though, this new one hooks a rug of metaphor more philosophical and religious. Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot) has used portraiture-at-three-ages before, in 1980's Metroland.
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