Long, slow-moving, and more than a little precious.
A self-consciously Dickensian account of an unconventional love from the author of Sister Crazy (2001) and the memoir Feed My Dear Dogs (2005).
Rachel Wolff is the daughter of Russian émigrés living in London. Zachariah is her lover. He is also her adopted brother, and therein lies the conflict at the center of this novel. It’s not that Rachel and Zachariah have a problem with their unusual romance—they do not—but their father does, and Lev’s disapproval troubles them both in different ways. Zachariah wants Rachel to choose between the two men. Rachel wants to maintain relationships with both. What could be high melodrama or gut-wrenching realism is, in Richler’s hands, a rollicking picaresque-cum-romance. Dickens is directly invoked, and Angela Carter’s screwball adventures—Nights at the Circus and Wise Children—come to mind. The difference is that Dickens’ novels, wordy as they are, are stuffed with incident. And Carter’s plots rattle along at a dizzying speed. Richler's novel is effusive and antic, but it’s also quite slow. Rachel and Zachariah are world-class chatterboxes, and the narrator never passes up an opportunity to set a scene in minute detail. “Rachel scrawls an encomium one day on her desk pad alongside a sketch of a pugilist in attitude, an encomium to Zach’s career. She uses the Regency style they both enjoy so much and reads it to Zach when he is home.” Readers immensely charmed by the preceding will almost certainly enjoy spending a few hundred pages with these characters. Readers who are less delighted should be aware that the whole book is like this, each and every paragraph. This is, among other things, a story about stories—Rachel plunders history, folklore, and fairy tales to create a pedigree for the orphaned Zachariah—so enthusiasm for the richness of the English language makes some thematic sense. But the Victorian slang and the Renaissance swears and the boxing arcana lose a bit of magic with each repetition.
Long, slow-moving, and more than a little precious.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-94652-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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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