Though the poet discovers plenty about love, friendship, and art in his quest, this novel is mainly slapstick, played for...
Historical farce that pits a middling London poet against a very gentlemanly Devil.
The foppish, fatuous poet is the narrator of this debut novel, and the title character is his foil, though the Devil turns out to be less of a presence than either the title or the setup would seem to promise. At the outset, Lionel Savage, a poet of some following but little literary distinction, discovers that he is all but broke. When the butler who raised him informs him of this, he responds, “Nonsense, Simmons. I don’t buy anything except books. You cannot possibly tell me I’ve squandered my fortune upon books.” Alas, he has, and he must remedy his situation quickly in order to continue to circulate in the high society to which he has become accustomed. It’s his good fortune—or is it?—to find himself matched with a beautiful heiress whose family apparently wants her to marry a poet, and he’s apparently as good as any. Yet six months after the nuptials, he has yet to consummate the marriage, share more than a few words with his bride, or write an acceptable poem since their courtship. “If you have ever written, you will know that it is either an arduous business or a simple one, but rarely in between,” he explains. “For me it used to be the one but is now the other.” At one of the society parties his wife throws to ease her frustrations, he encounters the gentleman of the title, explains his dilemma, and lends the Devil a book. That very night, his wife disappears. What follows encompasses his adventurously wanton sister, his wife’s famous explorer brother, an inventor suspected of treason, a wise bookseller, and the aforementioned butler, all of whom are attempting to answer two questions: did the narrator make a bargain with the Devil to take his wife? If so, how can he get her back?
Though the poet discovers plenty about love, friendship, and art in his quest, this novel is mainly slapstick, played for laughs.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-56263-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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