A treat for aficionados of local color and connoisseurs of street life and violence. And nearly 500 pages for everyone.
Welsh’s eight-volume novel (Filth, 1999; Ecstasy, 1996, etc.) is a windy exposition lasting two decades and detailing the lives of four Scottish pals who sustain a long friendship.
In any Welsh tale, there will be the matter of diction for the reader to make an early peace with. The author’s distinctively Scottish dialect, rendered with gratingly phonic accuracy here, never quite comes smoothly, making the novel something like a journey in a vehicle that sputters badly. This one is perhaps the most peopled of Welsh’s works (and the longest): the four friends Billy, Terry, Carl, and Gally are each given full treatment—childhoods, the lives of parents, the contours of early home life in a government housing project, or “scheme.” The four unite as friends and early on are involved in a violent rugby (“fitba”) riot where a youth is slashed with a knife. There are also, as the plot reveals, the neighborhood enemies Doyle and Polmont, lifelong antagonists. Of the others, Terry becomes an unpalatable small-time businessman; Billy is a successful boxer and afterward proprietor of an upscale bar and eatery; Carl shoots to modest fame as a musician and deejay; and Gally suddenly learns he has HIV. Flashbacks reveal that a week after the death of Polmont, he had committed suicide by jumping from a bridge, and this iconic instance of mortality stands as a focal point for all subsequent losses sustained by the remaining men. In their 20s, they’re scattered apart. Their marriages are generally broken and their children fatherless; they all threaten, as Terry nicely puts it, to “fade into gray,” into the shabby, grim world of their upbringing. An unexpected encounter with pop star Kathryn Joyner succeeds in highlighting the essential goodness of the men, and the death of Carl’s father reunites them as friends.
A treat for aficionados of local color and connoisseurs of street life and violence. And nearly 500 pages for everyone.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-32215-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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