Tudors in Tinseltown.
In Wolper’s ambitious mash-up, Anne Boleyn time-travels to Hollywood 2012, where she loses everything but her head to Henry Tudor, entertainment magnate and Internet kingpin. The usual suspects among the original King Henry’s entourage are here: chief henchwoman Theresa (Thomas) Cromwell; crooked financial advisor Carl (Cardinal) Wolsey, discarded older wife Catherine Aragon and her daughter Maren (Princess Mary). When Henry becomes entangled with Anne, a wannabe writer, the liaison is just what her ambitious father Thomas Boleyn is angling for, especially after Anne’s older sister Mary (re-imagined as a pot-smoking hippie) had failed to snare Henry. Captivating the “King” of Hollywood, Anne hopes, will also mean better roles for her actor brother George. Anne and George are close—perhaps a little too close? Theresa’s Webmaster and lackey Cliff acts as both catalyst and cynical observer as the drama unfolds. Catherine’s death (of an overdose caused by sheer absent-mindedness) enables Henry’s second marriage, no Reformation required. The euphoria surrounding Anne’s conquest of Henry and the birth of daughter Elizabeth quickly dissipates when Theresa sees the quirky new “queen” as a liability to Henry’s bid for the governorship of California. True to her alter ego, Theresa spins a web of lies about Anne’s youthful amatory escapades and current relationships with George and with a young singer-songwriter, (Sir Thomas) Wyatt. After Anne miscarries a son, Theresa invites her to lunch, plies her with pinot and engineers her arrest for DUI. Thanks to Cliff and his new hire, gossip-tweeting sociopath Lionel, Anne’s cyber-persona is quickly trashed. When Theresa introduces her friend, San Francisco debutante and dilettante jewelry designer Jane Seymour, whose political connections can revitalize Henry’s campaign, it’s all over for Anne. Although the conceit is fun, the excitement palls as quickly as the royal romance. Henry’s Hollywood hegemony is never believable: Tudor travails simply do not translate well to a time and place where power, however heady, is less than absolute. Still, a worthy and at times witty effort.
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5721-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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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