An initially ungainly but ultimately poised consideration of war’s long impact on feeling and faith.
An elderly Belgian woman takes a bittersweet look back on her war-torn youth, deliberately (and queasily) blending carnage and romance.
Helena, the narrator of Mortier’s third novel translated into English, opens her story with extended ruminations on old age and loss—we know that her parents are dead, as are her husband, daughter and brother, though the circumstances aren’t initially made clear. Her woolly, quasi-Proustian musings on time and God test the reader’s patience, and it’s not until about 100 pages in that her story—and the reasons she postponed telling it—comes more clearly into view. At the beginning of World War I, she moved with her mother from their bourgeois family enclave in Flanders to the home of some relatives in France, where they’re safer but still close to the shelling. During one assault, the pair are comforted by a British army photographer, Matthew, whom Helena promptly falls for. Her reminiscences about her sexual awakening with him gain a gauzy eroticism that’s pitted against her memories of the grotesque impact of the war. In the latter mode, Mortier is superb, particularly in one set piece describing the death of a young girl in detail, from her playing dress-up to getting killed by a stray piece of shrapnel to Helena’s role in carrying and preparing her body for burial. The push and pull of ugliness and beauty Helena witnessed plays into her conviction about humanity’s random and godless state of existence, as the title suggests: “give us back our mealy-mouthed petit-bourgeois world,” she writes, knowing that such comforts have been stripped from her. And as the novel moves toward its mordant close, Mortier gives Helena’s hard edges a moral and emotional justification—a strong closing that justifies its wobbly beginning.
An initially ungainly but ultimately poised consideration of war’s long impact on feeling and faith.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78227-017-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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