A Northern Saga, longer than an Arctic shadow and tougher to swallow than frozen venison filet, from a gifted poet and novelist (Seaward, 1993, etc.) who seems to have had a lot of time on his hands. Freeland can't be found on any map. Close to Greenland and Iceland, it's a former Scandinavian colony that lies just below the Arctic Circle and gives shelter to some 60,000 souls scattered across four small islands. The Freelanders, like most island people, live by fishing and, like all good northerners, love to drink. Lately, however, their children have been fishing less and drinking more, and quite a few have taken up hard drugs. This is the social crisis that Hannibal Hannibalsson, the President of Freeland, has to address in his campaign for reelection. ``I believe now,'' Hannibal declares, ``as I have always believed, that Freeland is the true world-light and if we remain faithful to ourselves we're the one true good hope of this troubled planet—the one true good hope!'' Hannibal's childhood friend Eggert Oddason, our narrator, is somewhat more cynical, adhering to the duty developed ``over a literary career spanning three decades and forty-nine books, to rail against my country and countrymen.'' Like most political pundits, Eggert starts with public issues but is more interested in private lives, and we soon learn how Hannibal managed his climb to the top and just how much it cost him and his friends—Eggert not least of all—for him to get there. A record of women shared and stolen takes up much of the story, as does a weird mystical quest for the ``Freeland Saga''—the ancient Freelandic epic poem whose possession by Iceland is a constantly simmering provocation. But it is hard to find much surprise in such an obvious election-year allegory, and it is harder still to see why such epic treatment was required. Skillfully crafted and conceived, but far too long and obvious.
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45083-1
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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