Still, an elegant novel of ideas, written by an author committed to her art.
In a welcome change from tales of bog-Irish poverty, Madden portrays 21st-century Dublin populated by a thriving middle class—and by three visual artists who, beckoned by a higher calling, decline to participate at great personal cost.
The art world cognoscenti consider Roderic Kennedy’s large-scale abstract paintings Irish treasures equal to the Book of Kells. But for his artistic achievements Roderic paid dearly: a ten-year bout with alcoholism, a ruined marriage, three alienated daughters and the near destruction of Dennis, his devoted banker-brother. Finally stabilized and painting again, Roderic meets Julia Fitzgerald, a 25-year-old conceptual artist living on tea, toast and artistic resolve. Dennis is fearful; such commitments were Roderic’s undoing in the past. But Roderic seems content to remain just friends with Julia, a fellow traveler on an aesthetic journey—until Julia has a chance meeting with William Armstrong, a middle-aged lawyer who long ago studied art and now realizes that he has disregarded his vocation at his own peril. Julia’s commitment to helping William re-find his artistic way irrevocably changes the lives of all three. Madden (One by One in the Darkness, 1996, shortlisted for the Orange Prize, etc.) takes on the daunting task of dramatizing the creative life, and the sweep of her book is ambitious, making use of dialogue about artistic process, interior monologues on masterpieces in museums, memory, hallucinations and dreams, plus childhood flashbacks and the particulars of the contemporary lives and personal entanglements of each artist, all told through viewpoints that shift from chapter to chapter. If the narrative drive eventually stalls, it’s only because the author’s dedication to her subject—why artists choose the lives they lead—outruns the reader’s engagement with her characters: they’re so earnest that their ultimate actions leave little room for guesswork.
Still, an elegant novel of ideas, written by an author committed to her art.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-55597-421-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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