Though heavy with New Age pop psychology, Dann makes a story soar as he finds common ground between the complicated animism...
A failed medicine man and an ex-Marine abandoning his family try to break every rule on a cross-country road trip during which heyoka—the Indian word for being contrary, irresponsibly antisocial, or going plain crazy—leads to mystical revelations, forgiveness and redemption.
Since leaving the States for Australia, Dann has kept one foot firmly within the SF genre as an editor (Dreaming Down Under, 2001, etc.) while penning darkly imaginative historicals (The Silent, 1998, etc.). First published a year ago in Australia under the title Bad Medicine, his latest starts slowly as bitter, toothless 66-year-old apartment superintendent Charlie Sarris finds that his secret drinking spot—a furnished room near a water heater—has been rented to one John Stone, a similarly aged, rootless Indian medicine man who likes strong drink and cigars. The landlord hires Stone to help Sarris clean up an apartment that’s been trashed by a welfare mother. Intrigued by Stone’s peaceful mysticism and barely repressed subversive streak, Sarris joins him in a trek to a sweat lodge in the hills around Binghamton, New York, where a rival medicine man, Joe Whiteshirt (whose wife, Janet, Stone had slept with a long time ago), causes, or fails to prevent, Stone from suffering painful burns. Sarris comes home to find that his teenaged daughter Stephanie is pregnant and goes out on a bender. Soon he and Stone are heading south, to Florida, for a showdown with Whiteshirt. Along the way, Stone’s uncertain mysticism and Sarris’s reckless need to raise hell converge in a series of harrowing misadventures that seem to make everything worse—until each confronts the unresolved conflicts in his past.
Though heavy with New Age pop psychology, Dann makes a story soar as he finds common ground between the complicated animism of Indian spirituality and the gritty, manic desperation of angry old men out to avenge themselves on their youth.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-765-30185-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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