Highly satisfying on many levels, this novel will have book clubs basking in its big symbols and abuzz over Tamara’s final...
Grounded by fog during a layover, a woman heading to New York recalls growing up in wartime England and the lover she has just left in Ireland in this thoughtful, multifaceted work.
In her ninth novel, the Canadian writer (Sanctuary Line, 2010, etc.) again taps her family’s Irish background. Tamara is one of a group of female pilots who ferry fighter planes around England during World War II. She then flees an unhappy marriage to settle with childhood friend Teddy in Ireland. A few years after his drowning death, she begins an affair with married Niall, a meteorologist whose County Kerry family is darkened by his mother’s suicide and the subsequent psychotic tantrums of his brother, Kieran. The unsatisfying relationship, full of long waits for short trysts, drives her to flee Niall for the U.S., when the clearly symbolic fog—see also the Eugene O’Neill epigraph from “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”—delays the flight in Gander, Newfoundland, and lets her ponder her life and the waiting room’s mural by real-life Canadian painter Kenneth Lochhead called “Flight and Its Allegories.” The novel essentially begins in that waiting room and then expands in parallel narratives about the painter and the brother while constantly returning to this former pilot, who wonders: “How could she, one of those previously forceful birds, find herself so essentially adrift?” Urquhart—whose prose at times flows from the same hand that has written four volumes of poetry—reveals her characters slowly, placing them within or privy to smaller narratives, vignettes, anecdotes that are themselves small marvels of storytelling and serve the several themes of love’s pain, family turmoil, and the elusive sense of home and place, especially in light of Ireland’s immigrant history. The Kieran narrative almost overwhelms with its powerful mix of sibling rivalry, Irish mysticism, and the passion of a first love. Yet ultimately, with Urquhart’s masterful hand, it fits well among the novel’s resonant whole.
Highly satisfying on many levels, this novel will have book clubs basking in its big symbols and abuzz over Tamara’s final decision; for when the fog lifts, there are two planes outside: one to New York and one to Shannon.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-22219-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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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