A staid, melancholy, cautionary sci-fi tale with an Orwellian, fablelike quality.
Faced with the end of his marriage, a mild-mannered man starts to question the omnipotent data-based System that regulates his society in this sci-fi novel.
Big Brother becomes Big PDA in author Davidson’s hands. In a future United Kingdom, the System is developed as a panacea to the world’s ills—an omnipotent online database, personal planner, and social network regulating all aspects of life. It monitors and communicates with its users via surgically implanted mobile units. The System’s artificial intelligence, with its prime directive to look after mankind’s security, is supposedly infallible, so nearly everyone gratefully follows its dictates, which have largely eradicated crime, poverty, and global overpopulation. (Never mind that dissenters who publicly question the System tend to disappear.) Advertising man Wallace Blair has especially close personal connections with the System; his grandfather had a part in its design, and his father currently holds a high maintenance position. Wallace is notified that his blissful marriage to Mary, a fanatical System believer, has been automatically moved to pre-divorce “Transition” status. Suddenly daring to doubt the System’s perfect judgment, he goes off the grid to delve into taboo family secrets—specifically, his grandfather’s mysterious breakdown and retreat from public life shortly after the System became active. At least, Wallace thinks he’s off the grid. Davidson seeds clues here and there that this indolent, apathetic, technology-blighted society is of a piece with the one depicted in Aldous Huxley’s classic 1932 dystopian satire Brave New World, which is looking less like satire with every passing year. Furthermore, he avoids the temptation to dazzle readers with florid descriptions of sci-fi marvels and jargon. Wisely, he keeps the System thoroughly offstage and mysterious—no towering computer-mainframe headquarters, no mecha battle-troops à la The Terminator (1984)—which makes the invisible, paranoid AI even more disquieting and the society which enabled it, equally so. A good deal of the plotline, in fact, addresses the relationships between three generations of Blair men. Plodder Wallace never develops into much of a rebel, any more than Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Winston Smith did, which goes much against the grain of the blockbuster mentality that typifies novels such as The Hunger Games (2008). However, it’s appropriate to the elegiac, downbeat tone.
A staid, melancholy, cautionary sci-fi tale with an Orwellian, fablelike quality.Pub Date: May 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1511491099
Page Count: 346
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
A novelist tries to adapt to her ever changing reality as her world slowly disappears.
Renowned Japanese author Ogawa (Revenge, 2013, etc.) opens her latest novel with what at first sounds like a sinister fairy tale told by a nameless mother to a nameless daughter: “Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here…transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones….It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island.” But rather than a twisted bedtime story, this depiction captures the realities of life on the narrator's unnamed island. The small population awakens some mornings with all knowledge of objects as mundane as stamps, valuable as emeralds, omnipresent as birds, or delightful as roses missing from their minds. They then proceed to discard all physical traces of the idea that has disappeared—often burning the lifeless ones and releasing the natural ones to the elements. The authoritarian Memory Police oversee this process of loss and elimination. Viewing “anything that fails to vanish when they say it should [as] inconceivable,” they drop into homes for inspections, seizing objects and rounding up anyone who refuses—or is simply unable—to follow the rules. Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities. Small acts of rebellion—as modest as a birthday party—do not come out of a commitment to a greater cause but instead originate from her characters’ kinship with one another. Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist’s emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator’s developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind.
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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