![]() ![]() 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. Faulkner's Mississippi and its inhabitants seem to have exchanged some of their nightmare quality for a quality of mercy, Southern style.Ī retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch. which, in showing how homogeneity in the South, and the Southern tradition of men of good will, is argued and expanded exhaustively, in a flow of concentrated prose. "human life is valuable simply because it has a right to keep on breathing.". We must expiate and abolish it ourselves, alone and without help, not even advice.". That is the plot powered theme, that "injustice is ours, the South's. When they return, with the Sheriff, the body is gone, and Vinson's family, respected for the terror they have created, help locate that body as well as Vinson's, and the murderer as well, thereby clearing Lucas. ![]() Aided by Aleck Sander, his colored companion, and Miss Habersham, a determined, incorruptible spinster, they accomplish their task and find, not Vinson Gowrie, Lucas' supposed victim, but a timber buyer casually known in the county. Charles, hating his debt to Lucas, who had once saved his life, is the only one who will listen to Lucas' hints as to his innocence, is driven to dig up the dead man to find proof of it. For the story here hinges on a 16 year old boy's active participation in preventing a Negro, Lucas Beauchamp, from being lynched for the murder of a white man and in being receptive to the impact of change in his inherited misjudgment of the black and white question. After a silence of eight years, Faulkner's new novel is sure of critical attention and wide interest, not only from the sheerly literary aspect but as an indication of Southern feeling on the controversial subject of the Negro.
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