This great writer’s rhetorical and constructive mastery remain unimpaired. But he’s still beating horses so long dead that...
The 2001 Nobel winner continues the story of Willie Chandran (Half a Life, 2001), an Indian-born writer (and presumable authorial surrogate).
We first glimpse Willie, a perpetual itinerant and outsider, after he’s left his Portuguese wife and Africa and moved to Berlin, where he’s staying with his sister Sarojini and her German husband. Sarojini’s revolutionary ardor rebukes his phlegmatic indifference to causes and allegiances, and so—somewhat improbably—Willie travels to India to join a Communist-led rebellion on behalf of that country’s underprivileged and exploited lower castes. He spends several years as a “soldier” and courier—vacillating between hopeful commitment and the cynical suspicion that his comrades are driven by unworthy agendas and doomed to fail—before surrendering to police and accepting imprisonment as the fate he deserves. Then his release is unexpectedly secured by old friend Roger, a British attorney, who argues Willie’s special status as an internationally significant writer. Freed, Willie returns to London and the home of Roger and the wife (Perdita) with whom he shares a desiccated, loveless open marriage. The novel’s emphases then shift curiously, as Willie’s reentry into intellectual life (working for a small architectural magazine) is subordinated to his subdued rediscovery of sex (with equally passive Perdita) and sharpened awareness of the slough of amoral cheapness into which England—and, by extension, Western civilization—seems to him to have lapsed. Naipaul ends with Willie’s characteristically resigned expostulation “It’s wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts.” Magic Seeds (the title alludes ironically to the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk) is a superbly elaborated screed, which eloquently restates the case for perceiving the contemporary world as irretrievably fallen: it’s a case Naipaul has been making for decades.
This great writer’s rhetorical and constructive mastery remain unimpaired. But he’s still beating horses so long dead that the stench is becoming overpowering.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-40736-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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
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
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