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
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
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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