Bainbridge’s 16th novel—and the third consecutive one based on historical fact (following The Birthday Boys, 1994, and Every Man for Himself, 1996)—offers perhaps the most brilliant demonstration yet of her matchless gift for storytelling concision and subtle suggestiveness. George Hardy is a successful Liverpool surgeon and amateur photographer—and a closeted, depressed alcoholic and homosexual who will seek his manhood by volunteering his services to soldiers wounded during the Crimean War. We learn these facts, if little else about Hardy, in six chapters narrated by the three people who believe they know “Master Georgie” best: the orphan girl Myrtle (adopted by the Hardy family), who devotes her life to him, even unto surreptitiously bearing the children his barren wife claims as their own; his brother-in-law Dr. Potter, a geologist and classical scholar whose portentous mid-Victorian homilies can neither explain nor even reach the distracted George; and Pompey Jones, a resourceful street-urchin and performer (specializing as a “fire-eater”) whose accidental entry into the doctor’s life makes him the latter’s all-purpose assistant, and occasional lover. From a deftly understated narrative keyed to six glancingly described photographs (each marking an important moment in her “hero’s” life), Bainbridge creates a haunting picture of a world in which human relationships are ruled by accident and people’s understanding of others is decisively distorted and limited by their own inner natures. The great events (such as the Charge of the Light Brigade) and figures (Florence Nightingale) of the Crimean ordeal linger faintly in the background as the ghastly momentum of the war’s carnage (climaxing at Sebastopol) is filtered through the expertly differentiated consciousness of the three narrators. And, in a triumph of imaginative empathy, Bainbridge captures the mystery and pathos of her characters’ essential aloneness in such distressing images as the sight of cherries rotting in a dead soldier’s lap or our final view of Myrtle, hovering in grief “like a bird above a robbed nest.” An exemplary work from one of Britain’s finest writers. (First printing of 50,000)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7867-0563-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
