Absorbing, utterly plausible post-apocalyptic fiction by an imaginative writer.
The story of two plague-fighting physicians separated by centuries—medieval Spaniard Alejandro Canches and modern-day doctor Janie Crowe—continues in the concluding volume of Benson's trilogy (The Burning Road, 1999, etc.).
Janie Crowe and husband Tom Macalester form in Massachusetts one of the few colonies of escapees from the devastating plague DR SAM, a deadly bacterium from Mexico that has decimated the world over the past eight years. Janie has in her possession the precious journal once belonging to the 15th-century physician at Windsor Castle, Alejandro Canches, who helped battle the original bubonic plague in Europe. Janie is convinced his journal reveals the psychic correspondence between that earlier age and the present; indeed, her son, Alex, has been scientifically conjured (by “nuclear transference”) from the genes of the ancestral physician Alejandro. While Tom and fellow explorers gather specimens and information on survivors outside the compound, the story cuts alternately to the Jewish ghetto of Avignon where Alejandro has been living in secret with his foster daughter Kate's son, Guillaume—Kate is actually the bastard daughter of King Edward III, while her son is the product of her brief marriage to now-deceased rebel Guillaume Karle. Alejandro and young Guillaume are summoned suddenly by Alejandro's old mentor, the surgeon Guy de Chauliac, on the shattering news that the vengeful English king, writing to the pope via his young secretary Geoffrey Chaucer, has decided to legitimize Kate as his daughter and marry her for political benefits to the loathsome de Coucy clan, murderers of Kate's late husband. De Chauliac's plan is for Alejandro to rescue Kate from Windsor Palace and reunite her with her fugitive son. All the while, Kate is plotting her own escape with the help of smitten scribe Chaucer. Back in the present, Janie and Tom encounter rogue groups of survivors in need of medical attention from Janie, and everyone has a sad secret to reveal.
Absorbing, utterly plausible post-apocalyptic fiction by an imaginative writer.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-33505-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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