Readers up to the challenge may enjoy puzzling through Wright’s intricate, imperfectly explained mythology, while others may...
A severely damaged girl embodies the soul of the Australian continent in Wright’s searing dystopian novel.
Wright (Carpenteria, 2010, etc.) plunges the reader directly into the chaotic world of the lost Aboriginal teen her eccentric rescuer names Oblivia Ethelyne. Rendered mute by the traumatic experience of a gang rape, Oblivia is hiding in the “deep underground bowel of a giant eucalyptus tree” when old Bella Donna, herself an escapee from a northern Europe now devastated by climate change, finds her and takes her to live in an abandoned ship floating on a polluted swamp inside a detention camp for Aboriginals. Here the heroine makes friends with the black swans of the swamp before she is taken away by brutal “boy genius” Warren Finch, who is about to become “the head of state of a dilapidated country in a dilapidated world.” After a grueling journey across the desert to a “skewed dream of a city” in southern Australia, Warren locks up his new bride like a princess in a castle while he travels around with a look-alike “television wife,” leaving Oblivia to consort with ghosts, rats, and a lice-ridden old snow monkey while she does her best to liberate the swans that have faithfully stuck with her and bring them home. In this nearly dialogue-free novel, the author pays little attention to character development, instead creating an impressionistic vision of a near future where humanity has nearly destroyed the natural world. While the relatively simple story could be told more concisely, and Wright’s use of language can be more exuberant than precise, Oblivia’s epic journey provides a strong thread to draw the reader through a sometimes-cluttered verbal landscape.
Readers up to the challenge may enjoy puzzling through Wright’s intricate, imperfectly explained mythology, while others may find the narrative obstacles thrown up along the way too much bother.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2478-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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