Living within Day’s consciousness can be a claustrophobic reading experience.
In a novel set in the years after World War II, occasional flights of poetry can’t compensate for a lack of narrative momentum.
For better and worse, the latest from Glasgow resident Kennedy (Paradise, 2005) takes place entirely within the mind of Alfred Day, formerly a sergeant and tail gunner in the RAF, who has been trying to come to terms with the profound changes that the war has wreaked within him. Somehow, Day has become an extra in a movie about prisoners of war, evoking memories of the traumatic experiences he endured and the events leading up to them. A nondescript Everyman—his name shortened to A. Day, as if signifying the everydayness of human experience—he has nonetheless survived an extraordinary ordeal. His movie experience blurs in his mind with the war, as he ponders the vagaries of fate, how others close to him, both in and out of battle, died, while he somehow survived. He also ponders the vagaries of love, with a woman named Joyce who is so vividly idealized in his mind—“the way she’s shining and naked and naked and shining, the way she is alight”—that the reader wonders how she ever became involved with someone so ordinary. A married woman, Joyce had a soldier husband who went missing in action. Then Day himself was taken prisoner, and whatever dramatic tension the novel sustains concerns the fate of their romance. As his mind wanders from present to past, he conjures memories of his beloved mother, his estranged father, the fish shop where he worked with his father before the war, the bookshop where he worked after the war, where he came to realize that his mind still wasn’t working quite right. On the film set (which never seems like more than a fictional device), Day mainly discovers that the war isn’t really over, at least for him.
Living within Day’s consciousness can be a claustrophobic reading experience.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26683-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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