Sensitive and finely written.
A visit from a wartime companion’s daughter stirs up unwelcome memories for an embittered ornithologist in this follow-up to Greenway’s Los Angeles Times Book Award–winning debut White Ghost Girls (2006).
Ignoring his doctor’s warnings to quit drinking and smoking, Jim Carroway winds up having a leg amputated in the winter of 1973. No longer able to get around Manhattan independently, he abruptly abandons his work at the American Museum of Natural History and retreats to his childhood summer home on Fox Island in Maine. Jim seems likely to drink himself to death there, perhaps as penance for the unspecified disaster that claimed his wife, Helen, many years earlier, perhaps to finally extinguish the bleak knowledge that “[h]e’d been stuck since the war.” He’s not thrilled to be distracted by the arrival of Cadillac, whose father, Tosca, worked with Jim as a scout in the Solomon Islands, preparing for the U.S. invasion in the summer of 1943. Cadillac is headed to medical school at Yale, and it gives Jim some pleasure to know that the bird-skinning skills imparted to Tosca long ago played a role in lifting his family from poverty and getting his daughter educated. But bleak memories—of Jim’s mean, judgmental grandfather; of his beloved, ultimately doomed Helen; of his grim experiences on Layla Island—make it clear how damaged Jim is. The foreboding mood is somewhat alleviated by the tender friendship that grows between Cadillac and Jim’s son Fergus, but frequent references to Hemingway and to Treasure Island (a book with which Jim is obsessed) do not bode well. Readers who don’t mind the novel’s leisurely pace and brooding tone will appreciate Greenway’s limpid, poetic prose; her richly nuanced portraits of a nicely varied cast of characters on both Fox and Manhattan islands; and her evocative depiction of natural landscapes and the birds whose study gave Jim the only peace he has known.
Sensitive and finely written.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2104-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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