A powerful, unflinching examination of the psychological wages of war.
A seriously wounded soldier wrestles with the trauma and guilt that haunt him in this novel.
Sgt. Charley Cooper is a battle-hardened Marine whose life—and mind—is suddenly shattered by an IED while stationed in Afghanistan. He suffers from extraordinary burns—his body is considerably scarred from the incident, leaving him noticeably disfigured. Even worse, he’s afflicted by a debilitating amnesia, remembering very little of his wartime experiences (“He tried to see the face of his Company Commander, or Gunny Morrison but they would not materialize. He knew he should be able to see his platoon leader’s face, but the likable young, 2nd Lieutenant was gone”). This makes it nearly impossible to overcome the post-traumatic stress disorder that originates in horror he cannot confront. His wife, Annie, struggles to comfort him, but Charley withdraws into his own solipsistic paralysis, finding solace in lonely inactivity. But as the distance between them grows, and financial distress creeps in, Annie threatens to leave Charley if he can’t find a path to recovery. Charley calls his Uncle David, hoping to score some free firewood in advance of a cold Maine winter, and David comes to visit to help him log the territory. Eventually, David and Charley start a logging business together, and that purposeful labor and an experimental medical procedure help Charley chart the course back to both remembrance and self-forgiveness. Linden (The Content of Character, 2011, etc.) masterfully contrasts the defensive inwardness of both David and Charley; David has Asperger’s syndrome, and he, too, frequently retreats into the inner recesses of his mind to hide from life’s major and minor stresses. This dysfunction equips him, though, to deeply understand Charley’s tendencies, and he often remarks upon this with a bracing candor that many would not voice. David confronts challenges of his own, and the book provides flashbacks to the time he spent logging the property with his Uncle Bjorn, which helps him to assist Charley. The author’s prose, spare and direct, potently conveys the emotional angst of men not naturally predisposed to introspection. While the subject matter lends itself to a cloying sentimentality or a neat and uplifting denouement, Linden exercises admirable restraint in avoiding both. This brief work poignantly expresses the havoc combat wreaks on even the hardiest warriors.
A powerful, unflinching examination of the psychological wages of war.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5089-5211-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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