Beautifully written, perversely entertaining and well worth a close look.
The Booker Prize–winning Irish author’s 15th novel is a (perhaps excessively) droll romantic comedy reminiscent of both Shakespeare’s gossamer romps and Iris Murdoch’s playful metaphysical gameswomanship.
It’s an unexpected offering from the creator of such mordant psychodramas as Ghosts (1993), Eclipse (2001) and Shroud (2003), though mortality and all its disagreeable attributes are its subject. The setting is Arden, the Irish countryside home where renowned mathematician and physicist Adam Godley is dying, consoled by his still-functional mind’s concentration on his pet theory that the existence of an infinity of infinities—and therefore of innumerable multiple worlds for us all to inhabit—is a logical, and hence arguably a literal possibility. Outside “Old Adam’s” thoughts, downstairs Arden houses the patriarch’s son and namesake, young Adam’s super-gorgeous spouse Helen, his paranoid termagant sister Petra (who’s compiling an encyclopedia of indignation and despair) and the siblings’ well-meaning but basically ineffectual mum Ursula. Their somewhat dreary lives are…well, enlivened by the presence of the Greek gods themselves, whose interrelations with humans (notably, the randy Zeus’s, with Helen) are recounted to us in accents of unimpeachable archness by Hermes, messenger to the gods, son of Zeus, and patron of assorted scalawags and doers of misdeeds. Not much happens, alas. But we do get to watch Hermes emulate his dad by seducing the ungodly Godleys’ housekeeper while rather fetchingly disguised. And Petra is so engagingly nasty, we almost wish she had found her way into a play written by Samuel Beckett (whose skeletal prose style broods gently over these pages, along with oodles and scads of Shakespearean echoes). It’s a strange bird of a book, perhaps a cross between Thorne Smith’s caper The Night Life of the Gods and the aforementioned Murdoch at her most inventive (one thinks of her 1969 novel Bruno’s Dream, a brilliant improvisation woven around another old man’s looming death).
Beautifully written, perversely entertaining and well worth a close look.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27279-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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