The new novel from the author of Lempriere's Dictionary offers a sweeping story of treachery and destructive love that begins in ancient Greek myth and carries readers to a breathtaking climax in the present.
In this novel, which begins in myth-shrouded ancient Greece and ends on a Paris film set, the boar of the title takes many shapes: first it is a savage animal, then an SS colonel during WWII, then the symbol of competitiveness between writers, then history itself. A complex vision binds the threads of the novel together and simultaneously defines each metaphorical strain. The book's first half takes place in ancient Greece, where a band of hunters chase after a mythical boar, their quest complicated by internal romantic and psychological struggles. Footnotes are sprinkled liberally throughout this section, detailing the location of relics or giving textual references, and occasionally tediously crowding out the actual text. The book then jumps to the contemporary story of poet Solomon Memel, a German Jew who was imprisoned in a Nazi labor camp during WWII, switching between tales of Solomon's life before the war, descriptions of his wartime torture and interrogation, vignettes from the his postwar literary career, and stories from the making of a film. The film's subject is the hunt for the boar described in the first section of the novel, which in turn is revealed to be Solomon's first published book, an allegory based on his wartime experiences. The footnotes in the first section, it turns out, are the responses of a fictional scholar to the work, designed to prove it historically inaccurate. Throughout, the book maintains a confidence and poetic cadence that pushes it forward, giving gravity to every event. Figures like Atalanta, a Greek huntress whose thirst for the Boar of Kalydon gives her unquestioned allure, or Solomon, perpetually persecuted and searching for a way to express himself, are timeless while also believably vulnerable. Norfolk's new work is a challenging and exhilarating read, matching his first two novels the critically acclaimed LempriŠre's Dictionary and The Pope's Rhinoceros in intellectual reach, and surpassing them in storytelling passion and intensity.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Declared Best Young British Novelist in 1993 and winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize for Lempriere's Dictionary, an international best seller, Norfolk would seem to have it made. His ambitious third novel ranges from ancient Greece, where mighty hunters track a wild boar, to a search by Greek partisans for an S.S. field commander, which has reverberations in 1970s Paris.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Readers of Norfolk's
Lempriere's Dictionary (1991) and
The Pope's Rhinoceros (1996) will be eager to read his latest novel, a tale of evil incarnate. The story begins in ancient Greece, as heroes from distant lands converge on Kalydon to hunt the boar sent by the goddess Artemis as destructive retribution for being slighted. As the suspenseful hunt for the mythic boar proceeds, a triangle emerges between Meleager, the son of the king of Kalydon; the hunter Meilanion; and the huntress Atalanta. The story then moves back and forward in time from the 1970s to World War II, when a group of Greek patriots pursue an SS officer. The triangle of love continues, this time in following the thrilling adventure of Sol, Ruth, and Jakob, three Jewish escapees from Nazi Germany. Norfolk's previous novels were developed on seeds of fact, which is also true of this novel, for the boar was a figure of worship, as was the bull, in Mycenaean and Cretan cults.
Eileen HardyCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
