Slight and obliquely told, but dense with atmospherics and creeping dread.
From the British author of The Hole (2001): a first US appearance of a slim, taut, creepy psychological thriller, written when Burt was 19.
Mattie is five and his sister Sophie seven in Mattie’s earliest memories of their gothic English country-house childhood, at first somewhat normal in the telling, but not enough to hide the fact that something—or everything—is just not right. We see the young Sophie through Mattie’s eyes as he recounts key details from their closed and obsessively secretive world. And we see Mattie, in the present, through the eyes of the novel’s narrator as, one night some twenty years later, he struggles to address those memories. Mattie has brought “Sophie” to the now-abandoned house in which he grew up; tied up and helpless, she tries to understand the adult Mattie as he speaks, looking for any clue that might help her. Their mother was a shadowy presence occasionally erupting in towering anger, their father almost completely absent, though he does show up to impregnate his wife: the new little brother doesn’t last long. Sophie, frighteningly intelligent, has an unexplained hold over their mother, who seems to fear her; and that fear is somehow related to Mattie’s nightmares of a terrifying figure, Ol’ Grady, creeping into his room at night and of Sophie’s protecting them. Sophie works hard to conceal her intelligence from her teachers, but the other kids know she’s not like them. When two boys make the mistake of getting into a schoolyard scuffle with Mattie, Sophie displays an almost inhuman efficiency in getting rid of them. As Mattie’s memories approach the day when 13-year-old Sophie is to go off to boarding school and leave Mattie alone with their mother, the identity of the monster in the family becomes less clear, and his captive realizes she’s not the first “Sophie” to hear the story.
Slight and obliquely told, but dense with atmospherics and creeping dread.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-44659-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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