Septuagenarian Haien's second novel (The All of It, 1986) is a simplistic though satisfying and pretty much traditional family chronicle. The word ``saga'' may be too dramatic to describe this history of the Shurtliff clan, since their lives are happily free of long- term suffering, shocking revelations, or mysterious people. Instead, Haien has crafted an old-fashioned tale in which nothing much happens but ordinary life. Beginning with the courtship and subsequent marriage of Maud and Morgan Shurtliff, two upper-crust Ohioans, the novel paints an attractive picture of the young couple, rich, kind, and deeply in love. The only shadow thrown across their lives is Maud's infertility, which leads the pair to the eccentric Miss Zenobia Sly and her Tilden-Herne Adoption Agency. They bring home happiness in the form of twin infant girls, Caroline and Julia. Soon after, WW II erupts, and the reader follows Morgan's ordeal in the Navy. After the war, a more somber Morgan returns home, picks up his law practice, and prospers; the girls grow; and the family buys a large manor house. All the while, Morgan keeps in contact with Miss Sly (against Maud's wishes: the elderly lady is a reminder of their girls' adoption), and the two form a warm, confidential (and platonic) friendship. Time passes, the girls go off to Bryn Mawr, and just as Morgan and Maud are preparing for a long European holiday in celebration of partial parental freedom, Maud dies of a brain hemorrhage. The latter parts of the story are devoted to the ways in which the family puts itself back together, how life moves on, and how love blooms again. Not plot but character creates the charm here: The relationship between Morgan and his charismatic father, his confidences with Miss Sly, and his interactions with his daughters are all depicted in affectionate detail. Far from groundbreaking fiction, but a gratifying, companionable read nonetheless.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-017003-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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