A strong vision so consistently gorgeous it’s sometimes tedious.
A first novel from Greer (stories: How It Was For Me, 2000) that’s both as sweeping and as slow as the comet that helps form its structure.
The perihelions and aphelions of comet 1953 Two give shape to this 30-plus-year epic about a group of scientists and scientists’ spouses touched by its celestial comings and goings. The action begins at a 1965 comet-watching party. Swift, the comet’s discoverer, has invited his pals and students to the small Pacific island where he first spotted the thing, but when a young boy falls to his death just as the meteor shower begins, everyone remembers that back in days of old, comets brought bad tidings to humankind. This dire event introduces repeat visits to a number of quirky lives at the intervals of the comet’s six-year nearest and most distant points—two young astronomers who marry other people when they should have married each other; Swift himself, lonely in his fame; Swift’s daughter, who grows up haunted by the memory of the dead boy; and Manday, the island astronomer who wants half the credit for the discovery of 1953 Two. Greer successfully captures the spirits of both men and women here, and manages to hold a great deal together without slipping. He can turn a phrase; the problem may be that he turns so many. No one here is as important as the omniscient narrator, who sometimes reveals things about the comet that no human will ever know, and who pulls the strings of his puppets’ sensibilities so relentlessly that they begin to sound alike, and familiar. Quotidian moments are accorded as much grandeur as the end of this ambitious fable, pumped up by endless wordplay reminiscent of young girls who put on makeup even when they’re alone.
A strong vision so consistently gorgeous it’s sometimes tedious.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27556-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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