Gaston may be to Canadian fiction what Ken Kesey was to American fiction of the 1960s: a renegade lyricist with a soaring,...
Two midlife crises are enriched and transformed by the Canadian near-wilderness in this ambitious novel from the Ontario author of Mount Appetite (2005).
It’s a precisely woven tapestry that gradually connects the odysseys and labors of its three protagonists. Transplanted Englishman Peter Gore has left his marriage and his job as a biology teacher to explore northwestern British Columbia, as far as the village of Sointula on Malcolm Island (off Vancouver), where the pristine past lives on, and where Finnish emigrants had established a utopian community (“Sointula” being Finnish for “harmony”). Fortyish Evelyn Poole has abandoned her husband Roy (mayor of an Ontario hamlet), summoned to the deathbed of her long-ago lover Claude Longpre. Following Claude’s death, she forms an oddball alliance with Peter, en route to Sointula and a reunion with her estranged son Tom, who left the family long before she did, during his troubled (“sociopathic”) adolescence. Meanwhile, Tom Poole has become a “whale man,” assisting in ecology student Catherine Macleod’s research, living with wounds sustained when a botched drug deal precipitated a gun battle, and waiting for his past to catch up with him. Gaston moves among their several stories with masterly skill, filling in narrative gaps with perfectly judged flashbacks (to Tom’s youth; Evelyn’s stultifying marriage; ecstatic years with Claude; and recent vigil at his deathbed), while painting an astonishingly detailed picture of a world so distant it seems indeed to belong to another time. Characterizations of Evelyn and Peter are particularly rich and searching (when they talk about sex, the book reaches irresistible comic heights), and the resolution of their quests, in an extended dénouement comprising one brilliant scene after another, is virtually beyond praise.
Gaston may be to Canadian fiction what Ken Kesey was to American fiction of the 1960s: a renegade lyricist with a soaring, ineffably generous narrative imagination.Pub Date: March 12, 2006
ISBN: 1-55192-843-4
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Raincoast
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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