A slim but pleasing meditative account of the Zen of mountain climbing from first-novelist Duane (Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast, 1996, etc.). Native San Franciscan Ray, himself a writer, sits at home waiting for his rejected manuscripts to arrive while he dreams of his past adventures with the charismatic Mo. The two pastimes are in fact well connected, for Ray’s novel chronicles Mo’s wild escapades and parablelike stories, centering on their pursuit of Yosemite’s El Capitan. Before Mo manages to return from his latest pilgrimage, Ray meets Fiona, an artist visiting San Francisco for her mother’s funeral. Just as the two begin to bond, Mo returns with hopes of attempting 91 Cap again (when last they tried, Ray froze with fear, and they descended before reaching the top). When the men meet up in an industrial loft gorily reminiscent of Survival Research Laboratories, Mo confronts Ray about his book (which had been kept a secret). Ray maintains his innocence, but Mo sees only betrayal: His life stories, he argues, should remain unfinished for as long as he’s alive. Mo leaves, and Ray follows—a running theme in their friendship. Nevertheless, after Ray gets sidetracked with a hallucinogenic experience at a Dead show, he falls in with Mo once more, and they do attempt the climb. Bad weather, few supplies, and the threats of hypothermia and death are obstacles they face just as a rescue team appears. Duane’s story of self-exploration is happily unfettered by New Ageisms, and succeeds partly because it chooses to tackle a small scale, not a big one. Even the nonclimber will get satisfaction from his reflections on the interplay of man and mountain. A nicely balanced work on the age-old quest for enlightenment.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-19083-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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