Evoking Coetzee’s Disgrace and Gordimer’s The House Gun, Cartwright brings new twists and a sure touch to his tragicomedy...
South-African born novelist Cartwright (Lion Heart, 2014, etc.) casts a sardonic eye on a London expat who’s trying to uncover, if not openly parade, his Afrikaner heritage.
For most of his adult life, Frank McAllister, Oxford-educated child of a liberal South African journalist, has succeeded wonderfully in keeping apartheid’s history at bay by adopting an English identity. A canny investor, he’s acquired an art collection and horses and a few good friends who are gamely paddling against the “onrushing middle years.” His one foothold in South Africa is a beach house nestled on the Cape Town coast where he can escape dreary London winters and his ex-wife’s bizarre demands. He’s relishing the chance to share this paradise with his new love, Nellie—a Scandinavian domestic goddess—and her mildly miscreant teenage son. Warming to the role of Kaapstad Prospero, Frank has planned nifty diversions for his guests. All the while, he strives to minimize their exposure to his not-distant-enough Afrikaner cousin, Jaco Retief. A once-promising snorkeler with extortionist tendencies, Jaco’s status dive in the “new” South Africa pricks at Frank’s conscience. Jaco’s presumption that “oom” (uncle) Frank and he are holdouts “up against” the current regime baffles and unnerves him. (At several points in the story, Jaco’s unfiltered rants whiz by—fast, highly comedic, loaded to kill like a psychopathic scuba fisherman’s spear gun—giving some urgency to Frank’s quandary over how to banish this badass kinsman for good.) Frank also wants to get on a fresh footing with his 21-year-old daughter, Lucinda, just out of rehab, who arrives on scene with a small black child whose parents’ whereabouts she promises to explain. Frank hopes she’ll open up on their planned trek to a few historical sites tied to his pioneering Boer ancestor Piet Retief. Retief’s infamous murder by a Zulu chief (re-created for Veldt tourists by live actors) doesn’t entirely match up with contemporary accounts, and Frank feels compelled to sort it all out. Shockingly, his born-again curiosity and engagement with a country and people he’s stood back from for so long expose him to a new “custom” he doesn’t see coming.
Evoking Coetzee’s Disgrace and Gordimer’s The House Gun, Cartwright brings new twists and a sure touch to his tragicomedy about a decent man’s rude awakening to shared history's capricious side. Caveat emptor, Ancestry.com.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63286-018-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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