The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet

The Big Bang Symphony, by Lucy Jane Bledsoe. Terrace Books/University of Wisconsin Press, 340 pages, $24.95 hardcover.

There are four memorable characters in Bledsoeâ??s novel about yearning and healing. Three of them are women. The fourth is Antarctica, which Bledsoe has visited three times â?? feet-on-the-ground research that captures the southern continentâ??s blend of mystery, menace and majesty with ravishing immediacy. Rosie is there for a third season on â??the Ice,â? a galley cook with nebulous dreams about a more rooted future; Mikala is there on an arts grant, hoping to find in the frozen landscape the musical muse that will heal her heart after the death of her lover â?? and perhaps to connect with the father she never knew; and Alice, a scientist to the core, is there to escape a clingy mother while finding her feet as a geologist. Bledsoeâ??s narrative of the womenâ??s stint in polar isolation, confronting the emotional puzzles of their lives, is riveting in itself. But the subplots â?? most centrally Rosieâ??s self-exile from her family and Mikalaâ??s childhood on a 1960s commune â?? add sublime texture to this crystalline novel.

The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet, by Myrlin A. Hermes. HarperPerennial, 372 pages, $13.99 paper.

Farce is prequel to tragedy in this comically giddy re-imagination of Hamletâ??s younger days, a novel that draws heavily on what happens later at Elsinore Castle in Shakespeareâ??s play. But even readers unfamiliar with that theatrical mainstay (and if thatâ??s the case, shame on you) can enjoy Hermesâ?? bawdy narrative in which Horatio, a poor but brilliant divinity scholar, is smitten by a young Hamletâ??s flamboyant personality and ineffable beauty. Commissioned by a wealthy merchant, Baron de Maricourt, to write a play for his cheating wife, Lady Adriane, Horatio casts Hamlet as a ravishing girl. Soon after, heâ??s also composing sonnets wrenched from his soul about his love for the Prince â?? while resisting Lady Adrianeâ??s seductions; she is also intent on seducing Hamlet. Shakespeare characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pop into the plot at odd moments â?? something of an in-joke for Shakespeare fans â?? while Hermes tosses in random lines from Hamlet. Eventually a mysterious poet, Will Shake-spear, appears as a rival for the affections of both the Prince and the Dark Lady. Based on a theatrical classic, this is classy silliness.

by Richard Labonte