The fallen priest is an old story, but newcomer York’s searing images mark her as a talent to watch.
Two devout Catholics, yielding to temptation, destroy three lives in this intermittently powerful first novel, a Canadian counterpart to Southern Gothic.
It’s June 1948 in Mercy, Manitoba, and Thomas Rose, the good-hearted butcher, is about to marry Mathilda Nickels, just turned 19. Mathilda spent her first nine years in an orphanage before being rescued by her aunt Vera, housekeeper to Mercy’s Catholic priest, who has just died. His replacement, Father August Day, marries the butcher and his bride. August is 26 but old in his ways and bathed in religious zeal, and that’s what captivates Mathilda, who shuns Thomas on their wedding night, pleading her period (a lie). When she confesses to the priest, all he can think is: Virgin! August knows all about the sins of the flesh. His loving mother Aggie was the town whore after her man had run off and she had to support herself and her son. Yet he cannot resist Mathilda’s advances and deflowers her in the sacristy, then immediately cuts off all contact. Mathilda becomes pregnant and, panic-stricken, offers herself at last to the long-suffering Thomas. Her panic returns as she is about to give birth: Who will the baby resemble? York tells this story of solitary souls driven to extremes in dozens of short takes, including glimpses of the town drunk, Castor, who lives hermit-like in a nearby bog and has truth-revealing visions. The wrenching climax will leave Mathilda and August dead and Thomas a broken man. But we’re not done. The novel’s final third jumps forward to 2003 in an overlong postscript about an encounter in the bog between Mary, Castor’s adopted daughter, and another clergyman, this time a slick, skirt-chasing evangelist, a far cry from the tormented August. These new characters have their problems, but the reader, powers of empathy depleted after that climax, will have little left over for them.
The fallen priest is an old story, but newcomer York’s searing images mark her as a talent to watch.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-883285-25-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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