Proof again that in the hands of an artist, no plot is hackneyed, no emotion too obvious.
O’Brien (Down by the River, 1997, etc.) returns to rural Ireland for a tale of love, land feud, madness, and murder.
Right from the start the author warns her readers that this mountainous countryside is a place of “fields that mean more than fields, more than life and more than death too.” Joseph Brennan and his sister Breege have resided and worked all their lives on a dairy farm that has been in the family for generations. Enter Mick Bugler, riding the mountain’s first tractor, home from Australia to claim the neighboring land his family has also held for years. At first charmed, then threatened by the big, bluff, self-assured expat-come-home, Joseph falls into a dangerous rivalry that becomes a slowly escalating war of threats, lawsuits, and bar fights. Inevitably, Breege and Mick become equally entangled in a relationship at first chaste, then, for one brief moment, physical. Clearly, things can only turn out badly. In the hands of a lesser writer, matters would degenerate quickly into clich‚s and the twee tones of a professional Irishman recounting the quirks of lovable small-town folk. But O’Brien, who tells her story in a mosaic of shifting tenses and points of view, has the gift of the great Irish master-singers, painting word- pictures alternately somber and giddy of a world that has no secrets, one where guilty knowledge fuels the fires of both rage and love. The supporting cast, which could have easily seemed two-dimensional (wily old solicitor, gossiping hairdresser, dumbfounded local cops) transcends stereotype in O’Brien’s memorably drawn portraiture. Her mastery of tone and register keeps Wild Decembers churning even when it’s a foregone conclusion where all that anger will lead.
Proof again that in the hands of an artist, no plot is hackneyed, no emotion too obvious.Pub Date: April 4, 2000
ISBN: 0-618-04567-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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