A deft bit of Lodgian satire of writers, media, and writing—with teeth as sharp as ever, but also with a heart, however...
Adapted by the author from a stage play of his own—with the result that it’s, well, a bit stagy—Lodge’s effort even so offers a satiric nougat that’s sweet indeed and less frothy than one might think.
What is a rich, famous, successful, divorced—and lonely—British TV scriptwriter to do when a high-profile interview in London’s Sunday papers turns out to be a scathing indictment of his shallowness and vanity, not to mention his piggish treatment of women? Well, if the scriptwriter is Sam Sharp, who’s heading for L.A. that very morning for some splashy studio work, the answer is this: quickly work up a revenge scenario, the first step being, on the way to the airport, to drop in on your oldest friend, the once-promising but now fallow novelist Adrian Ludlow and Adrian’s attractive wife Eleanor. Sam’s idea: if only Adrian will consent to be interviewed by the same famous but malicious journalist who so disastrously interviewed Sam, Adrian could, well, gather his own information, and, turning the tables, publish a scathing indictment of—ah, yes, of the infamous Fanny Tarrant, who, appearing at Adrian’s house to interview him on the appointed day, turns out to be young, pretty, intelligent, and curiously captivating to Adrian, who will, indeed, tell her far too much, revealing elements of his past that in intertwined ways implicate not only Sam but also unsuspecting wife Eleanor. How could he have done it? And how will all end? On that Sunday morning when the damaging interview is to appear, the reader will be every bit as much on chair’s edge as are Adrian and Eleanor—and will be every bit as surprised, and perhaps as moved, by the outcome.
A deft bit of Lodgian satire of writers, media, and writing—with teeth as sharp as ever, but also with a heart, however little be the book, that’s great, large, and full.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-14-029180-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
IN THE NEWS
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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