A fast-paced, gritty look at the back streets of Liverpool that could benefit from more depth and less dirt. Still, newcomer...
A tough Liverpudlian college girl delves into the darker sides of life, including female prostitutes, the “brass” of the title.
Millie and Jamie are best friends and partners in drugs and drinking, though, much to Millie’s chagrin, Jamie is planning to settle down and marry Anne Marie, a boring but pretty ex-model turned cosmetician. The story alternates between Jamie’s and Millie’s viewpoints, though it’s clearly Millie’s. She lives at home with Dad, a handsome college professor Millie’s fellow coeds swoon over, and she’s supposed to be working on her thesis. Instead, she spends most of her time in bars and on the street, pursuing ladies of the night, many of whom spurn her (one calls her a “perv” for wanting lesbian sex). British first-timer Walsh skillfully handles the local vernacular—it sounds real yet is far more comprehensible to an American ear than, say, that of Irvine Walsh, who’s an obvious influence. The raw style works best in the sex scenes: graphic, erotic, disturbing at once. But when Millie rapes a young girl in a bathroom stall (all the while assuring herself, and the reader, that “she’s letting me do this to her”), Millie goes from a somewhat dysfunctional young woman to a sexual predator—a shift that doesn’t ring true, given the broad strokes she’s drawn with. The story that takes over in the last quarter—Millie’s discovery that her father slept with her mother’s sister, explaining why her mother left years before—is much more compelling than the pub-hopping, cocaine-addled earlier scenes, though it does feel tacked on, as if Walsh rambled through a diary of Millie’s daily life before getting to the real meat of her character.
A fast-paced, gritty look at the back streets of Liverpool that could benefit from more depth and less dirt. Still, newcomer Walsh’s energy and language give an entertaining ride.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2004
ISBN: 1-84195-484-5
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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