Complex, funny, prescient, difficult: Kavenna's novel tackles nothing less than everything as it blurs the lines between...
Kavenna returns to the existential debate explored in her last novel (Come to the Edge, 2013, etc.) in order to further probe the question of free will in the age of deep data-mining.
In an alarmingly plausible near future, tech giant Beetle has risen to global prominence in the fields of transportation, communication, health, security, media, and everything else. The society it has engineered is safer, more efficient, and totally devoid of surprise until the insidious presence of Zed begins to derange the algorithm. In London, upper level Beetle Douglas Varley is awakened by his digital Very Intelligent Personal Assistant, or “Veep,” Scrace Dickens, to the news that something has gone terribly wrong. Without any prior warning from any of Beetle’s predicative programs, perfectly ordinary citizen George Mann has returned home from a night of anomalous hard drinking to murder his wife and two sons. In the hours that follow, the supposedly infallible Anti-Terror Droid, or ANT, sent to apprehend Mann makes a miscalculation and executes Lionel Bigman, an innocent bus driver and British Army veteran. A massive damage control effort follows in which the timorous Varley; Beetle’s narcissistic, youth-obsessed CEO, Guy Matthias; and the hacker-turned–Beetle IT guru Francesca Amerensekera attempt to tighten the already iron grip Beetle holds over the totally voluntary participants in its benign social revolution (which—as Beetle controls all currency and thus all means of social mobility—is everyone) while scrambling to stem the spreading chaos created by Zed, “the category term for instability.” Meanwhile, Eloise Jayne, a hard-nosed investigator for the Beetle backed National Anti-Terrorism and Security Office, and David Strachey, editor-in-chief of the Beetle-owned Times, Daily Star, Sun, and the Daily Record, seek the truth of Zed and its implications for a society used to the placidity of a near-total parent state. In the hands of a lesser writer, the novel’s convoluted plot, burgeoning cast of characters, and barbed use of Beetle brand tech-speak would leave the reader hopelessly tangled in the what of the novel before they ever got to the philosophical why. Kavenna, however, is a diligent scholar of her form, melding a massively complex plot à la Thomas Pynchon and the wicked social satire of Evelyn Waugh with a healthy dose of Gogol’s absurdist dysphoria thrown in for good measure.
Complex, funny, prescient, difficult: Kavenna's novel tackles nothing less than everything as it blurs the lines between real and virtual.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54548-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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