A first novel from New Zealand playwright McCarten describes the trouble that ensues when aliens impregnate an entire town. —It was some time on Saturday night after work but before closing time down at the pub that Delia Chapman saw a spaceman.— And that is where all her troubles began. Delia is a 16-year-old factory hand in little Opunake, New Zealand, a star center on the local basketball team, and’she swears—a virgin. But she is definitely pregnant, so her virginity comes under some scrutiny. There is no question, of course, that something is amiss: on the evening that she claims to have been abducted by the aliens, Delia was found wandering about in a highly disoriented state by Phillip Sullivan, the mayor’s nephew. Now Phillip, in town for a visit, has become by Delia and begins his own investigation of her claims. Meanwhile, Father O—Brien, the local priest, is asked to help verify the claims of a virgin birth, but Delia explains that she was raped by the aliens (—They don—t do it like we do. It’s completely different. They do it with heat waves—). This is unsettling enough. But soon another local girl claims to be carrying an alien baby, and then another, and eventually every girl in town has an alien on the way. Not only that, but strange crop circles appear, along with inexplicably dead livestock. What’s going on here? A mammoth hoax? Mass hysteria? Or an actual alien invasion? Anyone who’s ever lived in the country can tell you that rural life is not as sedate as it appears, but McCarten’s story is like something straight out of a fantasy—and a thoroughly engrossing one at that. Bright, witty, and hilarious: McCarten knows exactly how far he can push the envelope, and he doesn—t let up until the very last minute. More, please.
Pub Date: Feb. 8, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-16303-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
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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