A clever, affectionate poke in the ribs: just sentimental enough to be nostalgic, just sharp enough to avoid sentimentality.
Critic and first-novelist Sansom (The Truth About Babies, not reviewed) takes a wry look at an Irish village and discovers an exceptionally lively world.
Despite all the articles about the hip new Dublin scene, the Irish are still a fundamentally rustic people, more at home in the villages and crossroads they’ve come from for centuries than in the cities and suburbs that they’ve gravitated toward of late. Ask Davey Quinn. After years of making it big and living the high life in London, Davey has come home to the little Irish town in the middle of nowhere where he grew up. There have been some changes—the big old hotel in the center of town is now an abandoned ruin, and the American-style shopping mall has drained much of the business from the High Street stores—but Davey can still recognize most of the people. There’s the upstart millionaire Bob Savory, whose chain of sandwich shops (“Quality Food for the Discerning Palate”) have pushed him into the upper reaches of local society (alongside the likes of aristocratic Sir George Sanderson, publisher of the local paper, or realtor Frank Gilbey, who developed the mall). Billy Nibbs is a self-published poet who works as an investigative reporter at Sir George’s paper (The Impartial Recorder), under the serotonin-deprived guidance of editor Colin Rimmer. And Francie McGinn is the strangely charismatic pastor of the People’s Fellowship church, famous throughout this Catholic region for his quasi-pornographic wedding sermons and his Good Friday barbecues. It’s all very cozy and familiar, but the question still arises: Why did Davey turn his back on success in the big city and come home to this small pond? Maybe he wasn’t as successful as he lets on—or maybe he’s about to find something here that he overlooked the first time around.
A clever, affectionate poke in the ribs: just sentimental enough to be nostalgic, just sharp enough to avoid sentimentality.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-00-715739-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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
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
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