Great potential, clumsy execution.
Love crosses the color line, in the India of the British Raj.
A young Welshwoman arrives in India in 1920 with her newly married husband, a professional soldier. Theirs is a pragmatic union, not a romance, and when the woman meets an Indian doctor—a high-caste Hindu, Oxford-educated, fabulously rich, intensely idealistic—they fall passionately in love. After many separations and ordeals (the doctor is tortured by the Brits, the woman survives a knife attack by her vengeful husband) and many changes of locale (a dreary barracks bungalow, the gorgeous replica of an English country house, idyllic Jammu, wild, anarchic Peshawar), the lovers find refuge in the remote tea hills of Assam. That’s the storyline of Slaughter’s (Dreams of the Kalahari, 1987, etc.) ninth novel, and it looks inviting, possible grist for the Merchant/Ivory mill. Up close, however, there are problems. Isabel Herbert needs to leave Europe and the stench of a war that claimed her childhood sweetheart. But with her money and looks, couldn’t she have found a better mate than Neville Webb, a lowly sergeant and “lout” (Isabel’s word)? And in caste- and class-conscious India, isn’t Dr. Sam Singh slumming when he takes up with Isabel? That’s for starters. Husband Neville departs for the North-West Frontier to fight Afghans, leaving Isabel conveniently on her own, able to slip out of the constricting web of barracks society. It’s all too easy, even for a free spirit like Isabel, as is her flight to Delhi to become a doctor, with no thought of the marital repercussions. Neville does catch up with her, but the other major plot developments occur offstage: The brutal communal violence in which Sam’s wife dies, and a bomb attack aimed at the Viceroy, which leads to Sam’s imprisonment and torture (his father is an arms merchant involved with terrorists). The jerky narrative pauses often to reflect on Sam’s dual nature (black and English) and the age-old paradox of India: extraordinary beauty, abject misery.
Great potential, clumsy execution.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-11399-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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