Rightly or wrongly, Harris (Chocolat, 1999; Five Quarters of the Orange, 2001, etc.) delivers the goods for readers who...
In an ever-so-cozy tale, a woman returns to the small French island of her ancestry to reconnect with her roots and act generally plucky.
Amid descriptions of delicious scenery, quaint customs, and mouthwatering delicacies, the story is told of Madeline (“Mado” to anyone who cares) coming back from Paris to the windswept French island of Le Devin, where her father still lives after her mother’s death. There are two towns: the northern one, Les Salants, is poor, hardscrabble, and full of character, while the southern, La Houssiniere, is rich, arrogant, and touristy. Any guesses where Mado hails from? The ocean is indeed a harsh mistress, and Mado notices right away, after failing to make much headway in reconnecting with her taciturn, mule-headed father, that Les Salants’ formerly gorgeous beach has been mostly washed out to sea. Mado senses a project just crying out for her to organize, and so, in the grand tradition of fictional small towns everywhere, the people of Les Salants leave their grumpiness behind and band together to build a reef that will shelter the beach and, they hope, encourage some of the tourist business away from La Houssiniere. Unfortunately, though, the proprietor of La Houssiniere’s hotel, Les Immorteles, a foxy businessman by the name of Claude Brismand, won’t take the challenge lying down. As the battle rages, Mado has her father, a snooty sister, and a potential romance with an Englishman to keep her occupied as well, so there’s no telling whether the forces of good will be able to hold off the onslaught of the southern villains. It’s all as underwhelming as it sounds, chockablock with stereotypically earthy villagers and picturesque, Travel Channel–like prose.
Rightly or wrongly, Harris (Chocolat, 1999; Five Quarters of the Orange, 2001, etc.) delivers the goods for readers who can’t get enough of this sort of thing.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019812-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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