Nicely done, and just the thing for the History Channel addict of the house.
History is littered with examples of people doing bad things in order to land rare and exquisite prizes. And so is this funny, quirky tale that plays pleasing what-if games with the past.
Dock Bass has a Jimmy Buffett soul: Canadian author Smith (All Hat, 2003) lets us know early on that Dock would rather fish, play cards, and drink beer than do anything else, including deal with his socially ambitious wife and make the fat living she now seems to require. When a mysterious letter comes from a lawyer down Gettysburg way, Dock is glad to get gone—and gladder still to find that he’s inherited a little farm from a relative he scarcely knew he had. There’s work to be done on the place, but enough little rewards turn up in odd corners to keep Dock at the task: glass-plate negatives that may contain images of Lincoln at Gettysburg to add to the single photograph known to exist, a first edition of Notes on the State of Virginia, manuscripts, old tools. And then he finds the big one. Enter lawyers, reporters, treasure hunters, fortune-sniffers, and assorted hangers-on, until Dock’s back to his former karma-pecked self: “For a man who had, just a month earlier, driven off into the sunset with the sole purpose of uncomplicating his life, Dock Bass had somehow succeeded in accomplishing just the opposite.” Some of the characters in Smith’s roller-coaster narrative verge on caricature, but others—like young, beautiful Amy Morris, an ambitious TV reporter—become nicely complicated as the story unfolds and shaggy dogs shed their fleas. Smith takes his leisure in crafting smart exchanges: “Anyone with a brain would have taken that step,” one of Dock’s pursuers mutters. “I suspect this fellow is the dimmest of bulbs. Violent types usually are.” But Dock is smarter than he seems: so we learn as Smith’s story meanders amiably toward its satisfying payoff.
Nicely done, and just the thing for the History Channel addict of the house.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7650-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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