It must have been fun to throw all these semi-compatible elements together, but it’s not nearly as enjoyable for the...
A potent ghost story is buried under several layers of complication and explication in this highly imaginative, unfortunately labored tale from the popular author of Wicked (1995) and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999).
The fantasy elements that predominate in Maguire’s work (which also includes numerous juveniles) are strongly present in the story of Winifred Rudge, a successful writer of both books for children and “a trashy self-help succès de scandale,” The Dark Side of the Zodiac, whose current work in progress is interrupted (and influenced) by intrusive paranormal phenomena. While mulling over the fictional idea of a woman writer haunted by the ghost of Jack the Ripper, Winifred travels from her home in a Boston suburb to the London “rowhouse” owned formerly by her family and currently by her “stepcousin” and soulmate John Comestor, who has unaccountably disappeared (surely he was expecting her arrival?), leaving behind a flat occupied by two clueless workmen and (it seems) a particularly rowdy poltergeist. Perhaps this visitant is the aforementioned Ripper, or one of his female victims—or indeed the ghost of Winifred’s guilty ancestor Ozias Rudge (“the prototype for Charles Dickens’s Ebeneezer Scrooge,” as rumor has it). Winifred investigates all these possibilities, enlisting the aid of Comestor’s standoffish former mistress, a visiting American academic who specializes in medieval supernaturalism, a harried foreign-born young widow with occasional psychic powers, and a dotty downstairs tenant, cat-loving Mrs. Maddingly, who’s a virtual dead ringer for Dickens’s immortal, verbally dyslexic slattern Sairy Gamp. Things go bump in the night, the repressed details of Winifred’s past dovetail with her imaginative creations, and Maguire wraps it up with a genuinely creepy climactic ghostly confrontation.
It must have been fun to throw all these semi-compatible elements together, but it’s not nearly as enjoyable for the overburdened reader. Maguire’s free-ranging, high-energy imagination is a wonder to behold—but Lost is likely to lose many readers along the way.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-039382-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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