Despite its apparent departures from her mold, this ends up as one of Weldon's most characteristic fairy tales, with the...
Our preeminent fictional chronicler of the war between men and women takes a break to report on the state of battles between continents, generations, past and present.
Or so at first it seems when Sophia King, whose knowledge of life is based on the films she's edited, gets an imperious phone call from her grandmother, Felicity Bax, demanding that Sophia help Felicity sell her house in Connecticut and find a living situation more suitable for a person of her advancing years. For Sophia, orphaned, unmarried, and unloved but for the intermittent embraces of preoccupied director Harry Krassner, the summons is a call to arms—an invitation to confront her dead, insane mother Angel, her own dereliction in failing to rush to Felicity's bedside during an earlier medical emergency, and the brave new world of America, which Weldon is visiting for the first time. As unquenchable Felicity, aided by Sophia, the I Ching, and her fractious New England neighbor Joy, plows ahead on the new adventure of locating new digs, settling into the plush, sinister Golden Bowl Complex ("a CIA training ground for surveillance techniques and psychological warfare"), and embarking on a December-November love affair with an alarmingly incorrigible gambler, Sophia burrows more deeply into her family history, and soon shakes loose relatives she had never known about. But Felicity's escapades and Sophia's investigations alike reveal a familiar cast of villains—uncaring patriarchs, conniving mistresses, self-justifying parasites of both sexes—whose selfishness, greed, and cruelty Weldon's joyously caustic cadences hammer as they frolic and tickle the humorously humane readers she invites us to be.
Despite its apparent departures from her mold, this ends up as one of Weldon's most characteristic fairy tales, with the novelist (Big Girls Don't Cry, 1998, etc.) pressed once more into the role of the fairy godmother who'll rescue her heroines from the plots swirling perhaps a little too generously about them.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-87113-775-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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