A journey into “complexity on the edge of chaos,” shaded by deep-felt despair.
A thoughtful, knowledgeable exposé of half a century of America’s nuclear weapons industry that also makes a surprisingly absorbing first novel about a group of scientists competing for ascendancy at a California Bay Area lab.
By his late 30s, Philip Quine has fairly well squandered the brilliant scientific talent that initially won him his coveted position in J Section, R&D in Advanced Nuclear Concepts at the “Lab,” a think tank of brainy, eager-eyed University of California talent, probably modeled on Lawrence Livermore. Under the charismatic leadership of Leo Highet, a kind of oily p.r. man and prince of darkness whose adoration of Leonardo da Vinci gives him license to reckless arrogance, the Lab, goaded by an early ’90s conservative administration, is pushing to develop the so-called Superbright laser, the jewel in Highet’s wildly extravagant Radiance antimissile defense shield. Quine, cautionary by nature to the point of being unable to commit himself to longtime girlfriend Nan, warns Highet of overstating the laser’s capacity and even writes up an internal whistle-blowing report that eventually becomes the evidence that sinks Highet into scandal. Newly appointed acting director, despite his conflicting romance with Lynn Hamlin, a paralegal at Citizens Against Nuclear Technology, which demonstrates regularly against the Lab, Quine must appease the Department of Energy by switching the Lab’s direction to “dual benefit” and rooting out staggering cases of fraud, theft, and treason. Scholz, a composer of experimental computer music who lives in Berkeley, clearly knows his stuff, and from the inside. His narrative, far from being dry or academic, is densely layered, moving in and out of dizzying double-speak and acronyms, with a roiling display of personalities (the men are the scientists, the women the love interests), such as the emeritus founder of the Lab, Aron Reti, espousing the “cult of the beautiful theory,” and numerous wily senators.
A journey into “complexity on the edge of chaos,” shaded by deep-felt despair.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26893-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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