A long (720 pp.) first novel—partly grand entertainment, partly hobbyhorse—about a century-long battle between the sexes. Told mostly as oral history, it's occasionally garrulous, but it's also full of lore and a voice at times worthy of Eudora Welty. Lucy Marsden, born in 1885 or thereabouts, tells the tale at age 99 from Lane's End Rest Home, and she takes the book's epigraph to heart: "Myth is gossip grown old." In rhythm with Lucy's memory, the narrative meanders between war stories, family conflicts, rest-home instances, and rudimentary feminism. Lucy was the child bride of Captain Willie, a media-stop (oldest Civil War veteran) in modern times. Willie, crazed from the War, never got over the death of Ned, a beautiful boy, so Lucy's marriage chronicles a lifetime of abuse—until she wins a death-struggle and kills a nearly senile but still-cagey Willie. That climax takes a while to reach, however, for Lucy delivers many other richly told stories: Willie's war anecdotes, as well as a more grandiloquent version of the War told to Lucy by a classroom teacher; Willie's mother "Lady" Marsden's story (Yankees bum down her mansion and freed slaves loot it); the epic tale of ex-slave Castalia Marsden, ranging from Africa and slave ships to a present-day kinship with Lucy; the story of Lucy's nine children and of her own growth into liberation and feminism ("Males are frailer and shorter-lived and overly talented at the pride that depresses"); and a host of other tellings, usually in Lucy's gossipy dialect. A Disneyland for Civil War buffs-in a modernist version of Gone with the Wind-that's sometimes tedious but more often panoramic and moving. Either way, it announces the arrival of a genuine talent-one who seems to specialize in excess.
Pub Date: Sept. 8, 1989
ISBN: 0375726632
Page Count: 737
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1989
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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