Norman is a lively and imaginative writer, but too much of The Haunting of L. consists, so to speak, of a story that really...
A very promising idea—the phenomenon of “spirit photographs” (in which “uninvited guests” may be seen)—is somewhat clumsily developed in this disappointing final volume of Norman’s Canadian Trilogy (The Bird Artist, 1994; The Museum Guard, 1998).
Narrator Peter Duvett is a young photographer’s assistant whom we first meet in 1927 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as he lies in bed with his employer Vienna Linn’s wife Kala Murie, herself an artist of sorts, who offers “dramatic performances” attesting to the veracity of photographs in which dead people inexplicably appear alongside living ones. Peter’s narrative ranges backward and forward, focusing on the amoral Linn’s fraudulent doctoring of disaster photographs (disasters that he also “arranges”) created for godlike multimillionaire Englishman Radu Heur, a jaded connoisseur of catastrophes (who never appears). Another narrative strand reaches back to Peter’s childhood, and layers in (in distractingly rapid succession) his father’s accidental death, his mother’s unhappy second marriage and probable murder (still unsolved), and Peter’s frustrated retreat to Manitoba (where he encounters Vienna and Kala, falls in love with the latter, and reluctantly learns their several secrets). Following the failure of another planned disaster, a “verificationist” arrives from London to determine whether Heur will order the duplicitous Linn’s murder, more disasters occur, and the characters who survive them are last seen on shipboard en route to England, just before a final twist that readers will have long since foreseen. Does this sound like Iris Murdoch after a few too many Molsons? Norman doesn’t seem to have decided what he wanted to do with his novel’s rich theme, and fills its pages with often illogically related bizarre incidents. The best things here are the tales of ghostly photographic appearances attributed to the book that’s the slinky Kala’s “bible”: spiritualist Georgiana Houghton’s The Unclad Spirit.
Norman is a lively and imaginative writer, but too much of The Haunting of L. consists, so to speak, of a story that really isn’t there.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-16825-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
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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