Ellroy’s introduction pronounces this fledgling effort, presumably written around 1970, “a prophecy of the fine writer Mr....
This recently discovered first novel by Bunker (1933–2005), who wrote his way out of prison with a series of tough-guy novels and memoirs (Education of a Felon: A Memoir, 2000, etc.), hints at both the accomplishments and the limitations of his later work.
Southern California, 1962. Ernie Stark is a two-bit hustler with dreams bigger than his bankroll. Before he can rise to the next level in the drug-dealing subculture, he has to lift himself out of the gutter. The two-fix-per-day heroin habit his friend Momo Mendoza, a Hawaiian dealer, is subsidizing is about to turn into full-blown addiction. Det. Lt. Patrick Crowley, of the Oceanview PD, is pressing him to identify Momo’s supplier or go back to prison. Momo’s current twist, Dorie Williams, is coming on to him. And Dummy Floyd, a fearsome old prison mate who doesn’t need to talk to scare people, is hovering just close enough to give him the willies. After a slack opening movement in which Stark scores some start-up capital by running a con that seems a lot more clever to him than it will to savvy readers, Bunker settles into his true story: Stark’s attempts to get Crowley off his back and purchase or muscle his way higher up in Oceanview’s heroin trade by eliminating the competition. The story recalls the contemporaneous movies Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars, but Bunker’s voice is all his own, a weirdly compelling mix of stripped-down narrative, seen-it-all complacency, stilted dialogue and incongruous clichés (“The shapely dame moved with the swift sureness of a priest performing a grotesque ritual”).
Ellroy’s introduction pronounces this fledgling effort, presumably written around 1970, “a prophecy of the fine writer Mr. Bunker would become.” Strike “fine,” exactly the wrong word for Bunker’s real gifts, and that description is spot-on.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37494-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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
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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