An apt and enthralling remake that projects such alarming realism, it's difficult not to fear the onset of such a sinister...
It's 2014: Do you know where your freedom is? It's gone, at least in the post-9/11 new world order in this thrilling modern-day remake of Orwell's classic.
The United States has been renamed "God's United States," and nearly anything you say or do is monitored. Bots can kill you on site for not showing identification; practically all media sources have been banned; all nay-sayers, dissidents, intellectuals and Democrats have been either jailed, killed or driven underground; and the “War on Terror” has reached dizzying new heights. Blair does not paint a pretty picture of the police state into which the country has morphed–the extreme end-result of the Homeland Security and Patriot Acts and a government administration gone awry (to put it mildly). Winston Smith, a Nationalist Party hack driven by pure ambition, is trying to produce a propaganda film disguised as an updated version of 1984. Too bad–the powers that be don't want that movie to be made, and they'll do anything to make sure it's not. After Smith takes a fateful and much-needed vacation to London to visit an old friend, he finds himself experiencing firsthand just how vicious the government, to which he was once so loyal, can actually be. Blair creates a terrifying depiction of a democratic country transformed into a terrorized totalitarianism. While clearly a satire, the use of slightly altered current administration and media names–e.g., the “Blush” Administration; “Foxy News”; “John Bashcroft”–initially comes across as amateurish and reactionary rather than satirical. However, as the story progresses, this becomes less distracting and more disturbing. Blair infuses the novel with a progressive sensibility that, whether you agree with the politics or not, influences the plot line without dictating it–thus creating a more vivid, realistic picture, regardless of party lines.
An apt and enthralling remake that projects such alarming realism, it's difficult not to fear the onset of such a sinister dystopia.Pub Date: July 31, 2004
ISBN: 157-178-175-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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