Witty, convincing, and quite moving: a touching portrait of private grief and redemption.
An old man reckons up the fortunes of his life, written with touching English restraint.
Digby Walton has had a good inning, as they say in Britain, and he’s more than ready to move on. The heir to a ceramics fortune, Digby grew up in a manor house and, despite a brief stint in the army, saw very little of the world other than the family business. Thus, sheltered by circumstance and naïve by nature, he was somewhat unprepared for the emotional demands of family life, and his marriage to a Maltese immigrant of humble origins went badly: Digby’s dull and undemonstrative behavior as a husband caused the fiery Victoria eventually to tire of him and move back with her parents. He hasn’t fared much better with his son: Theo is a spoiled and shiftless lad who can’t hold down a job, blames his father for his own failings, and accuses him of driving his mother to despair. Digby finds some solace in the company of his friend Daisy, a faded actress whose son Howard (a demented anarchist who writes a violently seditious online blog) provides her with ample parental woes of her own. As Digby putters about on a history of the family business, Daisy tries to track down Howard, who was last heard from in Thailand and has begun posting bomb-making techniques on his Web site. Theo, in the meantime, has been thrown out of the house by his fed-up wife Jill and spends most of his time hanging out with jazz musicians and dictating a rambling, accusatory letter to Digby onto a tape recorder. No, this isn’t Beckett. It’s not even Sartre—for, the end, British author Wall (The Lightning Cage, 2003, etc.) manages, inexplicably but credibly, to wrap up the loose strands of these ostensibly meaningless lives into one large interconnected and harmonious strand.
Witty, convincing, and quite moving: a touching portrait of private grief and redemption.Pub Date: June 14, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32779-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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