In the symbolism of the Tarot cards, the magus is a magician as well as a mountebank. In this second novel, Mr. Fowles is also an illusionist. If it can be said (and it may well be) that there is a certain amount of sham in the showmanship, still he manages to keep his reader captive Just as surely as he did in the butterfly net of The Collector even though this novel runs more than twice the distance. Elegances sensuousness and a very dressy erudition are all part of the equipment... The performance is a masque, or as admitted, the "godgame" of one Maurice Conchis "rich in forgotten powers... strange desires." He was a deserter in World war I, reputed to be a collaborationist in World War II; he has great wealth and many gifts (hypnosis among them) and lives as a renaissance man in seclusion off a Greek island. Now his guest, victim or dupe is one NicHolas Urfe, a young man out of Oxford with a "second class degree and a first class belief in (himself)." He has come to Greece after abandoning Alison with whom he has had an intense affair, Just short of love and trust. Nicholas is invited into Conchis' well guarded "domaine" and there the mysteries begin: of Lily, whom Conchis had once loved and who had died after World War I; of her reincarnation, not only as Julie (Conchis says Julie is schizophrenic) but again as June. Then there's Alison's suicide which has, for Nicholas, its complicity of guilt, since it follows immediately on Nick's attraction to Lily-Julie-June. The games goes on and on; reality and illusion blur; meanings become apparent, or do they? In any case the intensity of the story itself diminishes them. Perhaps they're not even there... Whatever, Fowles manages to keep the reader caught between supposition and sudden surprise, it's a deceptive, seductive, startling entertainment. There's not much of that around and certainly nothing like this.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 1965
ISBN: 0316296198
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965
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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