Pleasantly fast and polished, in the John Sandford style. More Rain predicted.
Rich atmosphere and believable politics in a distinguished debut thriller.
John Rain is a half-American, half-Japanese hit-man for unseen masters in Tokyo, where he passes for a native, though he knows he’ll never completely belong. He has gotten rich by providing elegant eliminations of problem individuals for well-heeled, anonymous purchasers of his “consulting” service. The cold-bloodedness required for this chilling career comes from some very nasty experiences as a member of an American dirty-deeds outfit in Vietnam and from his childhood as an outsider, first in his father’s Japan and then in his mother’s America. Not that he’s a complete monster—he won’t kill children or women—but he’s not particularly interested in the why or who of his contractors or victims. But then the technically satisfying murder (by remote control fritzing of his pacemaker in a subway car) of a ruling party bureaucrat begins to undo Rain’s cool. First, the still-warm corpse of the bureaucrat gets frisked by a Westerner who pops up in the crowded subway car, and then it seems that Rain himself may be the object of a search. Working with his techie pal Harry, Rain follows threads leading to beautiful pianist Midori Kawamura, daughter of the guy he just killed. Sucked in both by her looks and her Julliard-honed jazz skills, Rain befriends Midori, who has no idea he did in Dad but who begins to wonder just what he’s about when he bursts into her building to rescue her from intruders when he should have been on his way home. The intruders, the Westerner on the subway, and many others are all after a disk full of political corruption revelations that Midori’s father was about to pass to the press just before Rain pulled the switch on his ticker. Rain’s black belt comes in exceedingly handy many times before the disk slots into the proper drive.
Pleasantly fast and polished, in the John Sandford style. More Rain predicted.Pub Date: July 22, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14910-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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