A ghost story that transcends the genre.
A clever, concise and original debut about life, loss and love.
Annie Colville sees dead people. They see her too, and often they want to talk. These encounters aren’t exotic or even particularly scary, just wearisome and taxing. The ghosts are concerned with banal affairs, trying to tie up loose ends before moving on for good. Given England’s vast history, the dead abound, running the gamut from Roman infantrymen to Victorian-era domestic help to the gay bloke taken out several hours ago by his jealous lover. The one characteristic they invariably share is the chocolate-brown hue of their clothing. Annie’s sixth sense didn’t make her the most popular girl in school. At home, her mother is unnerved by the whole medium thing and keeps their big, empty house filled with a rotating cast of foreign-exchange students and unsavory paramours. At university, things finally seem to take a turn for the better when Annie meets and marries Evan Bees, a secretive Ph.D. doing research in the archaeology department. Then Evan mysteriously vanishes, and her life comes unglued. If he’s dead, why doesn’t he come back and let her know what happened? Over the next seven years, the maximum amount of time before Evan can be legally declared dead and Annie must officially get on with her life, her mother is killed and Annie effectively withdraws from society around her. Holing up like a hermit in a series of impermanent residences, including the church where she holds weekly séances, she surfaces to solve murder mysteries and search for the father she never knew. Told by a chorus of narrators—some living, some dead—the story emerges gradually. Slavin’s prose is measured and confident: “I don’t think there is happiness. I think that is something cheap and plastic that they sell from cereal boxes.”
A ghost story that transcends the genre.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-8021-7032-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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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