A generally inspired writer fumbles with this take on monsters and manmade 20th-century mayhem.
Maine (The Book of Samson, 2006, etc.) falls short of his usual high standard in his fourth fictional riff on a well-known tale: in this case, an island monster in love with a buxom blonde.
K. is 40 feet tall with antennae, butterfly wings, feathers sprouting from his chest, fur covering his body, reptilian skin on his hands and feet. This nightmare collection of parts probably resulted from nuclear testing conducted in the 1940s, but the natives on K.’s South Pacific island have a creation myth to explain his presence, and once a year they sacrifice a maiden to appease him. The young women all die, but it’s not really his fault. Sometimes they fall from his treetop nest; sometimes they’re scooped up by a pterodactyl-type beast; sometimes they run away and are killed by the other weird jungle creatures. K. is neither predator nor prey, just a mindless vegetarian roaming around the jungle without much of what we would call consciousness. His life and perhaps his consciousness are altered when a group of adventurers including Billy, Johnny and his wife Betty land on the island. Soon enough, K. is restrained on a ship bound for America, where he will star in Billy’s traveling roadshow. Maine’s insightful, occasionally brilliant previous novels vivified the psychology and moral agenda of biblical characters such as Adam and Eve (Fallen, 2005) to create portraits marked by depth and originality. But his reinterpretation of King Kong seems oddly redundant: K. has little motivation but instinct, no inner life to reflect on, no outrage or sadness at his captivity. Throughout the novel, historical snapshots of Palestinians fleeing Israelis or dictators seizing control with the help of a familiar superpower seek to undermine the intentional campiness of the monster plot, but the allusions are too broad to achieve the tone of subtle wit and dread the author seems to intend.
A generally inspired writer fumbles with this take on monsters and manmade 20th-century mayhem.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37301-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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
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
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