Engrossing. For a novel that is as much parable as it is thriller, its impact is surprisingly emotional.
Published in Barcelona in 2002 and translated into 15 languages, this debut novel is a kind of Robinson Crusoe seen through dark glass.
Sometime after WWI, the young, unnamed narrator takes up an unlikely post. It’s the kind with appeal only for those who are embittered, angry and more than a little masochistic—all of which apply. He’s to serve a year on an uninhabited island somewhere in the Antarctic Circle, as the weatherman for a company that has an inexplicable—or at least unexplained—need for such a person. The island is not quite a mile long. Ships don’t go there. No friendly Friday type has ever gone there, and, at first, it seems as if the previous weatherman—the one about to be relieved—hasn’t gone there either. No trace of him in the cottage assigned to him as home, no trace of him in the forests surrounding the cottage, no trace of him anywhere. Instead, in the fortress-like, stone-constructed lighthouse, there is Gruner—German, gloomy, unwelcoming and beset. By whom? Or rather, by what? The answer to that soon becomes chillingly clear when our weatherman finds himself facing the onslaught of the mysterious, deeply enigmatic Sitauca—the humanoid horde that storms the lighthouse relentlessly. Indigenous to the island and seemingly hostile in the extreme, the Sitauca force the weatherman and Gruner into a partnership for survival. But what will happen to it when the bullets are gone? And what will be the fate of Aneris, the inscrutable female of the Sitauca species, whose siren-like lure to both men is irresistible?
Engrossing. For a novel that is as much parable as it is thriller, its impact is surprisingly emotional.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-18239-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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