Winner of Ireland's largest literary award for the best book of 1989, Banville's latest is an elegantly written, often darkly comic meditation upon evil and guilt—and a great imaginative leap beyond his previous efforts (Kepler, 1983, etc.). Frederick Charles St. John Vandveld Montgomery has returned to Ireland in a desperate search for money. Earlier, living with his wife on a Mediterranean island with no visible means of support, he blackmailed a drug-pusher into giving him a loan. When Frederick welshed on the debt, the man behind the pusher, Senor Aguirre, prevented the wife from leaving the island and threatened to kill her if Frederick didn't come up with the payment. Frederick, having come to Ireland, visits his mother in the countryside, where she is raising Connemara ponies, but there is no money to be had. Then Frederick kidnaps a young woman—a housemaid—in the course of a robbery and kills her ("It's not easy to wield a hammer in a motor car"). On the run, he falls in with a wise old family friend, Charlie French, who puts him up in his house unaware of the murder. Eventually, Frederick is spotted by a shopgirl and denounced to the police. While on remand awaiting trial, haunted by moral ambiguity, he writes this book of evidence, grappling with his life itself. ("Does the court realize, I wonder, what this confession is costing me?") Frederick begins to see that Charlie's well-meaning placing of him in a sinecure was the beginning of his downfall: always taking the easy way out has left him defenseless against the temptations of the world. There are still those who would help him get off—Charlie supplies him with the best defense lawyer in Ireland—but Frederick struggles to find meaningful guilt for his awful deed. A novel of high moral seriousness, gracefully written—one that lingers on in the mind long after it is read.
Pub Date: April 1, 1990
ISBN: 0375725237
Page Count: -
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1990
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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