Lots of steam but no real heat, from the ever-shameless Collins (Infamous, 1996, etc.).
Clunky potboiler from the former queen of B-movies and TV soaps, starring the descendants of a humble Irish housemaid who reach the heights of Hollywood stardom.
Young Millie McClancey, orphaned by the 1917 influenza epidemic, takes a job in the London house of a duke—and gets noticed by his dissolute son, who can’t resist her flame-red curls, cerulean eyes, and whatnot. Her ruination begins innocently enough: Tobias Swannell, handsome, swaggering heir to the dukedom and all its properties, loves to hear the sweet young thing sing music-hall airs, but her impromptu concerts lead to significant fooling around on the sofa. Pregnant and disgraced, Millie is cast out by the stern butler, then befriended by an elderly (and fortunately homosexual) theater producer, who puts her on the stage and arranges for someone else to care for her illegitimate daughter. Soon the toast of London and then New York, Millie throws all her energy into her career, warbling away in near-nudity and thrilling audiences that include sexy gangster Marco Novello. Millie’s inevitable slide into drink and depression—and her mysterious death in an explosion—put her daughter Vickie next in line for stardom, aided by Marco. Not getting the role of Scarlett O’Hara is a setback, but pin-up fame during WWII awaits, plus innumerable parts in lousy movies. Much-married Vickie moves on to the perverted grandson of the dissolute duke, not knowing that there’s an incestuous link. Her daughter Lulu, sired by the love of her life (a Gary Cooper clone), becomes a world-famous model known for her sultry sensuality and lesbian affairs. As a child, she accidentally saw the Cooper clone banging away lustily at her naked Mummy, turning her off men forever—except for one hot night with a paid superstud, resulting in a daughter, also Millie, who becomes an overnight rock superstar at 14.
Lots of steam but no real heat, from the ever-shameless Collins (Infamous, 1996, etc.).Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2002
ISBN: 1-4013-0000-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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