A muddled spiritual inventory that could have used a lighter touch.
An American man’s existential journey is aided by various women in Baker’s cerebral fourth novel (Dominion, 2006, etc.).
Here’s what we know about narrator Harper Roland: he's single; 37; only living relative is an aunt; lives in downtown Manhattan; burned out after seven years as a war correspondent for a small magazine. These details are thrown out casually, along with a hint that Harper is black. What matters is his emotional state, which is in flux. He’s been dating Devi, an emergency room doctor, but wants something more intense than what she’s willing to offer. He quits the magazine and flies to Paris to work on a screenplay for Davidson, an egotistical director of art-house movies. Intensity is waiting for him in the form of Genevieve, a bohemian beauty who declares, operatically, “you are my man.” They live at fever pitch until, in another bolt from the blue, Genevieve has a breakdown and sets him free. Harper, who identifies with Oedipus, endures the reversal of fortune even though he’s afflicted by “a vast, cosmic emptiness.” This is assuaged by a trip to Rio to join a friend’s bachelor party. In a brothel, he's charmed by a high-minded whore who ruminates on the soul/body connection before pleasuring Harper with the blend, but it’s only further south, down Patagonia way, that he overcomes his dread of becoming another lost soul when he meets fellow American Sylvie, a constitutional lawyer, and feels “a great uprush of kindredness.” Journey’s end? Not quite. Baker tacks on a final section set in Africa. Harper is on safari with Sylvie when they’re abducted by murderous, sociopathic guerrillas. What follows is standard-issue escape and pursuit, but the soul mates still find time to extol the cosmic energy of their first meeting.
A muddled spiritual inventory that could have used a lighter touch.Pub Date: July 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4405-8578-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tyrus Books
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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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