A mordant update of the Emperor’s New Clothes that’s often deeper than it thinks it is.
A loser embarks on the hoax of a lifetime.
Even though British newspaper columnist O’Farrell (Global Village Idiot, not reviewed) is also an experienced TV comedy writer back in the UK, this outing is more than a thinly veiled assault on the industry that has fed him (the m.o. for most TV-scribes-turned-novelists). Jimmy Conway is your basic sub–Nick Hornby waster, an ESL teacher in his 30s who lives in a sludgy seaside town and has a life not quite up to the standards set by the letters he used to write to his older self as a young teenager (based on the assumption that he’d be rich/famous by the time he read them). A sad stab at improving himself through jogging leads to a chance one-word encounter with TV personality (and jogger) Billy Scrivens, an incident Jimmy then plays up to his friends as proof of a supposed friendship. When Billy Scrivens suddenly drops dead, Jimmy, who happens to be walking/jogging by, is interviewed as one of Billy’s mates, a misunderstanding that gets turned into an invitation to Billy’s funeral. At the service, Jimmy tells someone he’s a comedian, a lie that grows legs when a reporter decides he wants to do a story on him. Pretty soon Jimmy, who doesn’t believe he’s done much else with his life up to this point besides walk the dog (“Youth is like the mornings: if you don’t make a good start before lunch, you’re in danger of wasting the whole day”), is fabricating an entire double life for himself as an edgy anti-spotlight comic who’s infamous for some routine involving a fish. O’Farrell keeps Jimmy juggling his two lives far longer than you’d think possible, and even though it all comes to a frustratingly snappy ending (O’Farrell is a TV writer, after all), there are enough brilliant comic monologues to keep the pages flipping right by.
A mordant update of the Emperor’s New Clothes that’s often deeper than it thinks it is.Pub Date: May 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-4134-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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