The escapes, captures and riots are not much of a distraction from John’s dismaying passivity, which dooms the whole project.
For a human created by scientists, a childhood trapped underground is followed by an equally grim adulthood aboveground in this bleak fantasy, the author’s second novel (Cloud 8, 2003).
The two male scientists are murdered by a God-fearing mob that’s discovered their secret lab, but the embryo, in its aquarium tank, is rescued by government operatives. After birth he is studied by other scientists; his few happy moments come in a cage shared by Abigail, a gorilla who provides unconditional motherly love. At age five he’s transferred to an underground cell, one of a network that houses other scientifically conceived boys, and given a name, John Smith, and a roommate, Sterling. They will spend the next ten years underground, guarded by Men in White, as they receive a basic education and conditioning for life in society. John will be treated to some interactive television, allowing him to eat a traditional breakfast with a model Mom and Pop. But where are the girls? Sterling, more spirited than John, intends to find out. With John’s help they break out twice, but are recaptured. The third breakout is a full-fledged revolt; they emerge aboveground, where soldiers escort them to a small house. In due course John is driven to Mortarville, a ravaged industrial town. He becomes a security guard, is promoted to security director of a downtown mall and spends his days writing reports underground (again), part of “the world’s endless army of middle management hacks.” John finds a small ray of light in his neighbor, the ethereal Dora, but their relationship is not developed, and the clumsy ending (mayhem at the mall) offers no resolution. Bailie’s point in all this is that John’s mandatory childhood incarceration was an appropriate rehearsal for the prisons of choice of regular folks; his exotic conception was just a frill. It’s not exactly a dystopian vision.
The escapes, captures and riots are not much of a distraction from John’s dismaying passivity, which dooms the whole project.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9788431-1-3
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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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