Brittle wit turns to sentimental taffy by the end.
An unnamed woman delineates her life in terms of her involvement with ten archetypal men.
British newcomer Gray opens her story at the end of the 38-year-old, half-French/half-British narrator’s affair with “the Virgin,” who has chosen her as his first sexual partner but is less sure about her as wife material. The narrator then moves back in time to her own deflowering at 19. She marries and follows her schoolmaster husband to an island boys’ school, where she is lonely and neglected. She uses a meaningless affair with “the Lawyer” as her excuse to end her failed marriage and return to England. Next, she becomes involved with two men: “the Lover,” who is good in bed but begins to seem intrusive, and “the Lord,” an older, wealthy authority figure with whom she has the upper hand as long as she keeps things platonic. But sex changes the balance of power. To escape the ambivalent Lord, she takes a job in Texas with “the Billionaire,” who is not only the richest but also the most controlling man alive. When they break up, he pays for her to go to college, where she studies acting. “The Director” gives her professional help and meaningful looks but stays with his wife. “The Actor” is handsome, but too nice to hold her interest until it’s too late. “The Cerebral Mr. X” wanders through but is even more shadowy than the other men in the narrator’s landscape. Back in London, she works as an actress in commercials. She finds she’s pregnant by the banished Virgin, but miscarries just as the idea of settling down is taking root. Then on the last few pages she meets a single father with a charming son, and Cupid’s arrow finally hits its mark. “Frank’s dad” turns out to be “the One.”
Brittle wit turns to sentimental taffy by the end.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-87113-891-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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