Hardy’s lack of novelistic skill hobbles her attempt to pull together the personal and the political, the past and the...
Kashmir is the setting for this messy first novel by a British nonfiction author (Bollywood Boy, 2003, etc.).
It’s October 1999. A coup in Pakistan rattles nerves in Indian Controlled Kashmir. The majority of the population is Muslim, and Muslim guerillas have been fighting the army for ten years. Even the unabashedly secular Gracie Singh feels the ripples as she totters around her houseboat on idyllic Nagin Lake, across from the summer capital of Srinagar. English Gracie, pushing 80, is the widow of an Indian aristocrat; her beloved son Hari died young in a car accident. A feisty eccentric, well-lubricated by gin, Gracie is the default protagonist, cared for by a mute, Suriya Abdullah, and her beautiful daughter, Lila. The Abdullahs are a powerful local clan; their effective head, Masood, is Gracie’s landlord and erstwhile drinking companion. Now Muslims are under pressure to be devout, and Masood has fallen into line, though he’s distraught when his nephew Irfan disappears, fearing (correctly) that he has joined the guerillas. Indian soldiers come looking for Irfan, treating the Abdullahs with contempt; the Major, a disciplined bully, hints at ethnic cleansing. It’s the novel’s most powerful scene; Hardy’s grasp of her material is less sure when it comes to personal relationships. An unconvincing young journalist, Hal Copeman, arrives from England to interview Gracie, though she’s not part of his assignment. He becomes her houseguest and falls in love with Lila, a woman half in shadow. The mystery of her paternity, her mother’s mute condition and their loss of status, from rich Abdullahs to lowly servants, will not be revealed until the epilogue. Hal and Lila will make love twice, and Gracie will have a lovely 80th birthday party before the lurking violence closes in.
Hardy’s lack of novelistic skill hobbles her attempt to pull together the personal and the political, the past and the present.Pub Date: April 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-8021-1822-4
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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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