Like its major characters, a novel that is appropriately fragmented and without a center.
The suggestive title contains this novel in miniature: a community of soldiers confronts harrowing choices on the battlefield and eventually faces loss, fragmentation, and meaninglessness in civilian life.
In Afghanistan, in 2004, seasoned vet Armando Torres cites a Marine Corps slogan to newly arrived Wintric Ellis: "Be polite, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet." This paradox haunts the two of them as well as Big Dax, a soldier even more hardened than Torres. After establishing some of the boredom and horrors of war, the novel dips into the past. We see the logic of Wintric’s decision to enlist two weeks after high school graduation, for he’s come of age in a Northern California town that offers little that he values. The story then skips to Torres’ past in Colorado Springs, where we meet his smartass, cynical father, imprisoned for unintentionally killing a man after setting a forest fire, and his mother, soon to be horribly injured in a car crash. Big Dax, we learn, has grown up in Rutherford, New Jersey, and is overly influenced by his risk-taking, amoral friend, Alston. On their return from duty, they all find that, at home as in Afghanistan, nothing quite makes sense. Wintric marries his girlfriend, Kristen, who naively believes that “the war won’t live in him forever.” Torres returns to his family, where his wife anxiously asks him, "Did you kill anyone this time?" And Big Dax links up with a serious girlfriend, Nicholle, whom he marries; she carries the baggage of a pathologically disturbed and dangerous brother. By the end of the novel we realize the war has intimately shaped the men's lives without giving them meaning.
Like its major characters, a novel that is appropriately fragmented and without a center.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-38098-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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