A touching coming-of-age story, powerfully but gracefully infused with a spirit of place, which also pays tribute to a...
For a teenage boy living on the coast of England in 1914, change is everywhere. Freud’s (Lucky Break, 2011, etc.) evocative new novel intermingles the dawning consciousness of an imaginative, creative child, who meets a real artist, with the irreversible alteration brought to a small community by the start of World War I.
The Suffolk coastal landscape—its history, weather, natural fabric and ever shifting aspects—suffuses Freud’s delicately detailed chronicle of village life, in which sailing, fishing, shipwrecks and beachcombing are the stuff of local existence. Tom Maggs, 13 and born with a twisted foot, knows the terrain like the back of his hand and roams it freely. Tom has a taste for drawing, which is how he first encounters the dark figure of Mac, aka Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the noted Scottish architect and painter who, with his wife, also a renowned artist, is living locally, recuperating from illness after a career dive. Tom’s father, an alcoholic, terrorizes his family while the Mackintoshes’ loving companionship offers a different version of marriage. The couple also encourages Tom’s sketching, and he becomes their mail boy, delivering their letters to the post office, after steaming them open to read the contents. Once war begins, soldiers constantly come and go, the town and beaches are fortified against invasion, and Zeppelins fly overhead, dropping bombs. Tom and those around him are increasingly affected by the new laws, the distant fighting, and the national mood of fear and suspicion. When crises arrive, they propel the boy forward into an unimaginable future in which he will always cherish the love and artistic devotion he witnessed during that shattering year.
A touching coming-of-age story, powerfully but gracefully infused with a spirit of place, which also pays tribute to a revered artist.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62040-883-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
PROFILES
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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