Rambling and unfocused: a nicely written debut tale that meanders slowly in no particular direction.
An impoverished family tries to scrape by during hard times in the backwoods of northern California.
In 1977, the hinterlands of the West Coast are inhabited largely by the very poor and the very weird, and the Colby family fits both categories. Jake, an unemployed logger, is part-Indian, likes the occasional drink, plays the fiddle, and has a nasty temper that he keeps under control most of the time. His wife Dale is a devout Jehovah’s Witness and has raised their children (Lacee, Micah, and Justy) in the faith despite Jake’s agnosticism. The decline of logging in the Eel River woodlands—brought on in part because the mountain the Colbys live on has been bought by a mining company—has made it difficult for Jake to support his family. He takes odd jobs where he can, digging graves and so forth, and once in a while he will hunt deer for food. This causes problems, however, as the mining company has threatened to evict tenants caught poaching on their land. So Dale makes Jake vow never to hunt again. She has taken a vow herself, promising never to sing (she has a beautiful voice) except in her Kingdom Hall during meetings. And seven-year-old Justine has vowed never to speak again until her father finds work. Although the Colbys are pretty traditional by 1977 standards, there are also a good number of hippies in the area, mostly from Berkeley or the East. They circulate a petition against the mining company’s plans for development, fearing that they will pollute and ruin the local ecology. The Colbys don’t sign (Dale doesn’t believe in voting), but they become friends with Ochre, the son of one of the hippies. When Jake’s father Kyle comes for a visit, the two men find a long burden of tension between them.
Rambling and unfocused: a nicely written debut tale that meanders slowly in no particular direction.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14898-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: BlueHen/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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