A novel of war that asks hard questions about what decency demands of us as human beings.
Five aid workers with divergent agendas drive a truck loaded with supplies into the heart of war-torn Bosnia.
Author, doctor, and humanitarian activist Rufin poses a moral dilemma in the midst of this war novel/road adventure. The book opens on a tense scene between Maud, a young French idealist whose worldview has clearly been shattered, and Marc, a former soldier who's convinced her to join him on his mysterious mission. From there, we flash back to the road where a group of aid workers is driving two 15-ton trucks loaded with humanitarian supplies from Lyons to an unsafe zone in Bosnia. Virginal Maud enjoys driving the big truck but is a bit overwhelmed by her companions, who include Marc; his friend Alex, who returns to Bosnia seeking the girl he left behind; Lionel, the conflicted head of the mission; and Vauthier, a profane, overweight lout who strikes Marc less like a humanitarian and more like a cop. It’s winter in Bosnia, and the book uses the harsh weather and the group’s tension to create a dire, desperate mood. It’s Alex who voices the book’s moral challenge. “Once you’ve spent some time with these people…you no longer see things the same way,” he says. “In fact, they don’t give a damn about what we can bring them….They’re really tough.” The central question here is what is the best way to help victims of conflict? Rufin voices this query in a well-written coda: “What do the ‘victims’ need—to survive or to win?” It’s eventually revealed that Marc has chosen a side, seeding the humanitarian supplies with high explosives to help a Croatian faction blow up a bridge. But by the time his ruse is revealed, Maud has fallen in love with him, and Vauthier is in pursuit. This mix of well-crafted characters, psychological suspense, and the harsh realities of life in wartime results in a nail-biting, challenging literary thriller.
A novel of war that asks hard questions about what decency demands of us as human beings.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-160-945-372-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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