Not really successful as a novel, but literate, provocative, and at times quite surprisingly moving.
An intellectual’s revolt against the faith of his father becomes a disabling shaping force in this talky if intriguing first novel.
British (now Washingtonian) literary critic Wood (The Broken Estate, 1999) has as his narrator an Englishman by the name of Thomas Bunting, a philosophy professor who moonlights briefly as an obituary writer—explaining missed deadlines by citing the recent death of his father, a respected priest in a rural northern England village. But Peter Bunting is at this point decidedly alive—and the aforementioned falsehood is only one of hundreds concocted by his son, who’s not so much a Doubting Thomas, or even a committed atheist, as a lifelong “evader” of truths that confirm his father’s confident worldview and seem to limit Thomas’s own possibilities. This makes the story sound tedious, which it frequently is, owing to a plethora of conversations between Thomas and his estranged wife Jane (who loves him but hates his duplicity); his childhood friend Max Thurlow, a newspaper “pundit” (who “was succeeding for both of us”); assorted colleagues and acquaintances, and—interestingly—Terry Upsher, a semiliterate workingman whose simple honesty suggests the nature Thomas has resolutely rejected. The title denotes a book (his “BAG”) that Thomas is supposedly writing (instead of completing his long-aborning Ph.D.), which argues from design that the horrors of existence prove that whatever God created them isn’t worth worshipping. This is of course unoriginal, but it’s still the insistent nerve center here, particularly in climactic scenes wherein Thomas is all but silenced (if not persuaded) by his father’s lucid eloquence (“ . . . if you take God away from the world, the world is no less . . . painful or sinful or unsaved. It is simply painful and sinful . . . without the hope of salvation or succour”).
Not really successful as a novel, but literate, provocative, and at times quite surprisingly moving.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-11538-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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