Through much of this impressive first novel, almost up until the awkward and misguided finale, young Scottish writer Banks achieves that fine British balance—between horrific content on the one hand and matter-of-fact comic delivery on the other. The narrator, whose cool prose is sometimes a bit too sophisticated for credibility, is 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, living outside a remote Scottish village—a cheerfully insane lad who tortures animals, imagines that he gets instructions from the "Factory" (the room upstairs where he cremates wasps), and fondly recalls the three grisly/farcical murders he committed from age six to age ten. Is there good reason for Frank to be so blithely unhinged, so devoted to his warfare against wildlife and his ritual killings? ("How the hell am I supposed to get heads and bodies for the Poles and the Bunker if I don't kill things?") There is indeed. His father, an ex-hippie and sometime chemist, is a shambling eccentric obsessed with measurement. His flower-child mother deserted Frank at birth, then briefly returned when he was three—and may have helped to cause little Frank's life-shattering accident. (A nasty old dog supposedly chewed off the toddler's genitals.) Furthermore, Frank's older half-brother Eric, who was deserted by two mothers, has gone certifiably bonkers—setting fires, eating dogs; his madness was triggered by a ghastly moment while working as a hospital orderly (a grotesque horror for only the very strongest of stomach); and now he has just escaped from the asylum, making his way home to Frank, "a force of fire and disruption approaching the sands of the island like a mad angel, head swarming with echoing screams of madness and delusion." Banks handles this gothic/clinical material, for the most part, with sure, deadpan restraint, echoing William Golding, Saki, and Joe Orton—while finding hilarity in fugitive Eric's loony phone-calls to Frank, in misogynistic Frank's drunken rambles with dwarf-pal Jamie. Here and there, however, the underlying themes of sex/aggression are spelled out lumpily. ("All our lives are symbols. . . women can give birth and men can kill.") And the final chapter, mixing Eric's violent homecoming with revelations about Frank's true sexuality, pushes a delicately gripping nightmare-novel over the edge into psycho-melodrama and sexual polemics. In sum: a nastily striking, somewhat uneven debut—at its dreadful best when not straining for symbolic shockers or cosmic resonance.
Pub Date: Aug. 24, 1984
ISBN: 0684853159
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1984
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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