On its own, this book is a noteworthy event. When put in conversation with Reservoir 13, it is nothing short of a remarkable...
McGregor revisits the world of his Costa Award–winning novel, Reservoir 13 (2017), grimly complicating everything.
This novel and its predecessor are organized around the same mystery: A 13-year-old girl named Rebecca Shaw has disappeared while walking on an English moor with her mom and dad. The parent novel then glides omnisciently through village life for the next 13 years, describing divorces, death, the changing seasons, and dreams haunted by Becky Shaw. It is a lyric experiment, with the details of an almanac or poetic gossip rag, and it is at once mesmerizing and subtly tragic: Lives unfold impassively, with a minimum of both intention and result, while the reservoirs swell with rain and foxes give birth and Becky slowly fades from memory. Now, in this companion volume, McGregor has taken a different approach, brilliantly repainting (in mostly darker hues) a village we thought we knew. The book’s conceit is introduced in the first chapter: In the wake of Becky’s disappearance an interviewer arrives to collect stories and “help to build a picture.” The following 14 chapters are those stories, rendered in an urgent, close third-person. In some we meet Becky alive, a precocious “live wire” who leaps into a flooded quarry, smears dirt onto a self-conscious boy’s face, and steals an apple from an old woman’s garden. In others we are offered glimpses of her possible fates: stumbled into a sinkhole, run away from home, fallen afoul of the “bogeyman figure” who’s briefly suspected by the police in the early pages of Reservoir 13. But, as with its predecessor, this book is not singly concerned with Becky. In fact, her disappearance is used—by the narrator in Reservoir 13, by the interviewer in its sequel—as an excuse for observation, a reason to listen to the gossip and mark the seasons, a reason to dive beneath the surface of a place to grapple with the lives and stories transpiring there.
On its own, this book is a noteworthy event. When put in conversation with Reservoir 13, it is nothing short of a remarkable experiment in storytelling. McGregor is a must-read writer.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-936787-91-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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