A prizewinning, magnetic first novel of rising, dignified passion, and a perspective-snapping breach to business as usual...
A British fishing and wilderness travel writer turns to fiction to deliver the bad news about what exactly happens when a small, rural stream and its environs undergo industrial development.
Clarke’s direct prose allows the reader to nest in an environment and witness its demise. The setting is a stream that flows through an old farm, ancient woodland, and an English settlement that can measure its years in millennia. Short chapters chronicle the stream’s fate month-by-month, alternating between the natural rhythms of the water and the effects on it of nearby industrial development that taps into the flow, a synchronicity that Clarke plays with to great effect. The area’s struggle for economic survival conflicts with the laws of continuity, the natural “law that governed all things,” as the author puts it. The stream environment’s needs, and those of the cob and the trout, the salmon and the willow and the mink, do not mesh with those of an electronics plant. Clarke’s knowledge of waterways—he possesses both the scientist’s eye and that of an affectionate familiar—brings readers into intimate association with the food chain supporting the glorious small streams that grace the countryside and give particular character to fast diminishing farmland. Questions of balance, heritage, and priorities are at stake, as well as the peaceable ether of a ramshackle farm. Clarke keeps his language as spare as a prose poem, emphasizing consequences that have a raw and inexorably troubled edge. He judges character by effect, and everyone falls short. As for the trout, the mayfly, the otter . . . wrong place, wrong time.
A prizewinning, magnetic first novel of rising, dignified passion, and a perspective-snapping breach to business as usual from an author who knows the beautiful cycle of stream life—and all that will be lost with its demise.Pub Date: July 15, 2004
ISBN: 1-58567-528-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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