From acclaimed Britisher Trollope (The Best of Friends, 1998, etc.), a bittersweet tale of the painfully divided affections created whenever a stepfamily is formed. An adroit choreographer of the baffled dance of the contemporary English family, Trollope now details the confusions caused as old marriages end and new alliances solidify. When Josie Carver marries Matthew Mitchell, a deputy-school principal, it’s a second marriage for each. Both have children from their first: for Josie, it’s eight-year- old Rufus, while Matthew has three—Becky, 15, Rory, 12, and 10-year old Claire. The previous marriages were mutually unsatisfactory. Josie, married to widower Tom, with grown children of his own, found him decent but dull. Matthew, hitched to volatile, self-absorbed Nadine, tired of coping with her eccentric behavior. But, though stepmothers are traditionally regarded as malevolent forces, stepchildren can also behave badly. And while the Mitchell trio found mother Nadine difficult to deal with, loyalty demands that they now make Josie’s life difficult (as well as their father’s). In fact, Tom’s adult daughter Dale deliberately destroys his new romance with thirtysomething civil servant Elizabeth—because Dale never got over the death of her own mother when she was a child. The parents are also tugged by loyalties to their children. Josie’s new marriage undergoes increasing strain as Nadine blackmails her children emotionally, the children fail at school, and Becky runs away. When Matthew’s three move back with him, Josie feels not just even more stressed but alienated from Matthew (who takes his children’s side instead of supporting her). Still, Nadine’s emotional breakdown and a professional crisis for Matthew bring the family closer together, and Josie’s Rufus begins to feel as much a part of the new family as his half-siblings. Family ties affirmed with warmth and wisdom. (Literary Guild Selection)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88513-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
IN THE NEWS
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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