Much of the time clumsy, but fiercely interesting.
Houellebecq, who writes in French and lives in Dublin, offers a second try (after Whatever, 1999) that’s said to be a hit abroad. Often pretentious—or flat-footed—it nevertheless holds the reader solidly with its guess about mankind’s biological future.
In the late 1950s, two brothers are born to the same hedonistic and socially rebellious mother, by different fathers; both of the boys (since none of the parents—all brilliant—is much interested in them) are raised by grandparents and, in the case of one, sent then to boarding school, where miseries are unspeakable as older boys torment and torture him. That’s Bruno, two years older than Michel, who, luckier than Bruno in living with a beloved grandmother, proves to be ultra brainy. The novel trudges on through the lives of these two brothers, Michel turning inward (seemingly more and more incapable of expressiveness or of love) and drifting toward becoming the molecular biologist who will later change humanity forever, and the ultra-sexed Bruno going through intensities of sexual experimentation that will end in madness. Least believable may be the descriptions of Bruno’s forays through the sex-camps and -clubs of France (“ ‘Sophie,’ he said with heartfelt emotion, ‘I’d like to lick your pussy’ ”), though contenders lie also in long unrealistic “conversations” on relevant topics (Huxley, utopianism) and in Houellebecq’s tendency toward the ungrounded pronouncement (“A subtle but definitive change had occurred in Western society during 1974 and 1975 . . .”). And yet, all this having been said, the working out of these lives does gain power and the sheer ambition of what Houellebecq is aiming for slowly becomes clear. Probing for the primal definitions of personality and emotion, he sets Michel to his work in molecular DNA discoveries—and introduces a narrator speaking to us from 2079 to explain the awesome and ironic revolution that’s been brought about.
Much of the time clumsy, but fiercely interesting.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40770-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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