Harmless, obvious, and about as full of surprises as a timetable.
A long-haul potboiler from the indefatigable Baldacci (Wish You Well, 2000, etc.) introduces a hardcase reporter to America and wins him his true love.
The decision to make an overnight train trip often begins with a good idea (scenery or nostalgia, say) that doesn’t survive the rigors of the journey. Tom Langdon is an exception in that he takes Amtrak from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles out of sheer necessity: The airlines have banned him from all commercial flights for assaulting an insolent metal-detector guard. That should give you a good insight into Tom’s character right there—for the rest, all you need to know is that he’s a divorced freelance journalist who is dating a Hollywood voiceover actress. Since Tom is due to spend Christmas in LA with his girlfriend, he decides to make a virtue of necessity by writing an article about train travel in the US, so he books a private compartment on the Capitol Limited and heads for Washington’s Union Station one snowy December night. His fellow passengers are a mix of flesh: There’s Agnes Joe (a large and overbearing former trapeze artist), Father Paul Kelly (a retired priest), Julie and Steve (an engaged couple who decide to get married on the train—literally), Gordon Merryweather (a sleazo lawyer who calls himself the “king of the class-action lawsuit), and a mysterious group from Hollywood who board secretly to avoid publicity. Tom wanders about the train, innocent and relatively carefree, until he discovers that the woman at the center of the Hollywood group is the famous screenwriter Eleanor Carter—his ex-wife! Even more amazing, Eleanor’s director Max Powers finds out that Tom is a writer and convinces Eleanor to collaborate on a project with him. It looks like Tom’s career is taking off after all. But will he be able to work with Eleanor now that they’re on a purely platonic level? Probably not—but who said they had to do it that way?
Harmless, obvious, and about as full of surprises as a timetable.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-446-52573-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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
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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