Although Clement (Pretty Is as Pretty Does, 2001) can get preachy about the oppressed poor and the evils of war, she...
An Oregon woman’s life unravels as she grapples with the possibility that another woman was murdered because she was not.
June is supremely happy in her life. She likes her job as the cook in an elementary school attended by the more downtrodden children in town, and she loves her husband Bill, a chef, with whom she has shared a childless but blissful marriage for ten years. One day when June’s car breaks down, the father of a child from the school offers her a ride home. She considers the invitation, then decides she’d rather walk. That same afternoon, the man is arrested for the rape and murder of another woman, Vernay Hanks. June did not know Vernay, but the dead woman’s child Cindy is also a student at June’s school. June feels responsible for the death, thinking the murderer took Vernay when he couldn’t get June. Without telling Bill, and under the false pretense of having been Vernay’s friend, June visits Cindy, who lives with her uncle Harlan. As June insinuates herself into their lives, she puts off telling Bill. As clues pile up, June rationalizes away her suspicions that Bill knew Vernay until the day Cindy appears wearing a bracelet that belonged to Bill’s mother. Confronted, Bill admits he had a year-long affair with Vernay. Although he apologizes, June’s trust is shattered and they separate. She continues to see the Hanks, both of whom she has begun to love, without mentioning her connection to Bill. Of course, they discover it and are devastated. Then it turns out the police arrested the wrong man. June’s eventual clarity is hard-won, but as a character she never quite jells.
Although Clement (Pretty Is as Pretty Does, 2001) can get preachy about the oppressed poor and the evils of war, she wrestles eloquently with some meaty issues: lies, responsibility, chance.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-7266-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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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