An intelligent account of a town succumbing to mass hysteria—but much too gradual in its pace.
Myerson’s fifth novel (after Laura Blundy, 2000, etc.) is a portrait of the fears and confusions ignited when a brutal murder takes place in a small English town.
Nothing was ever the same in town after Lennie was found dead in the garage. A wife and mother of two, she was last seen leaving a PTA meeting in her hometown in the north of England. The next day the police found her mutilated corpse (the heart had been cut out). Tess, a local physician, was Lennie’s longtime neighbor and best friend, and, in the aftermath of the crime, she helps look after Lennie’s husband, Alex, and the children while he attends to the official duties of identifying the body and meeting with the police. Tess and her boyfriend Mick are also questioned by the police, who seem just as dumbfounded by the case as do most of Lennie’s friends. One of the investigators is Ted Lacey, a “family liaison” specially assigned to take testimony from relatives and friends. In the course of her meetings with Lacey, Tess becomes more and more attracted to him, and eventually the two begin a secret affair. It’s hard to keep secrets in a town consumed with suspicions, but Ted and Tess manage—until Tess’s young daughter Rosa disappears while Tess is away at a rendezvous with Ted. Is this the work of a serial killer, or has the girl simply run away from home? And why is Darren Sims, a simple-minded farmboy who never hurt a fly now going about town bragging that he and Lennie were lovers? If Miss Marple ever made it to Peyton Place, she’d be able to sort out the loose ends in no time. But she’s nowhere to be seen here.
An intelligent account of a town succumbing to mass hysteria—but much too gradual in its pace.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-77984-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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