A novel about Martin Luther King Jr. from the National Book Award-winning Johnson (Middle Passage, 1990, etc.), who continues with his strange combination of high-flown philosophy and down-home folksiness. Ontological antinomianism is Johnson’s subject here, and he uses just that kind of heavy-duty words to impress—even bludgeon—readers, who may or may not be willing to follow along in what starts out as a fairly ingenious story. The novel pairs Martin Luther King Jr. with one Chaym Smith—a double for the civil rights leader who offers himself to King as a stand-in or decoy. The odd name is, as the narrator tells us, an etymological variant of “Cain.” It’s ominous, and the omens are all the darker when two sinister FBI agents show up to co-opt the civil rights leader’s evil twin and . . . and what? Johnson adduces much paranoid speculation, but there is no clear resolution or anything new about King’s assassination, or, indeed, about King himself. We’re simply left to imagine whatever skullduggery the FBI could have been up to. Chaym just disappears, and along with him goes any semblance of purpose to all the foregoing exposition. All Chaym says explicitly before he vanishes is that they (the FBI) are blackmailing him and want “to embarrass” King in Memphis. He wasn’t embarrassed; he was shot. But even if the G-men were somehow behind this, their role is never made clear, and Johnson doesn’t offer the vaguest suggestion about the possible use to which the Feds could have put their coerced doppelgÑnger. Almost as serious a defect in the book, however, is that King’s character is never fully developed. We see him as suffering and conventionally saintly, hardly given any real character at all except that he smokes cigarettes and prefers catfish, pigs’ feet, and collard greens to lobster. Johnson’s in-your-face style seems all the more annoying for having led nowhere, and for having failed to produce any coherent vision of one of the great storylines in the epic of American history. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 4, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-81224-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
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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