Dense and often funny, this reissue is necessary reading for fans of both Green and modernist fiction.
Green draws on his experience with the Auxiliary Fire Service in this intricate 1943 novel about waiting for and living through the London Blitz.
When Richard Roe joined up with the AFS, nine months before Britain entered WWII, he never expected war would really occur; when it does come, his company braces for raids but is met instead by near-endless tedium, packed into an overheated substation, playing workplace politics, waiting for hellfire to rain from the sky. Roe's situation is complicated by an incident involving his subofficer Pye's sister, who abducted Roe's son as he stood dazzled in the stained-glass light of a toy shop, "a permanence of sapphire in shopping hours." This is the merest taste of Green's descriptive spellcasting, his almost psychedelic sketches of varying qualities of light and the emotional, sensory, and psychological effects of color. With his sister confined to a psychiatric institution to avoid prosecution, Pye wonders, finally, if he played a part in her deteriorating mental state. Roe's wife and son, meanwhile, have been evacuated to his childhood home. He visits them infrequently, on a slow train scoring a line along which he makes a clean break between his existence in London, where he gives in to the frenzied lusts of wartime with Hilly, the station's mess manager, and his familial life in the country, where he is overwhelmed with love for his wife. The two seemingly disparate states are not at odds in his mind, true to Green's deep understanding of the protean, multilayered nature of human existence. Green's acrobatic syntax yields not an easy reading experience but a rewarding one, as he weaves multiple narratives over and through one another, reeling among perspective shifts, zigzagging through clouds of memory and conjecture. At last comes the final conflagration, which does not kill but consumes Roe, rising up in a blaze of heat and color, death and danger.
Dense and often funny, this reissue is necessary reading for fans of both Green and modernist fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 9781681370125
Page Count: 208
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
PERSPECTIVES
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
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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