One of childhood's worst nightmares comes true in this gritty first novel: While their parents go exploring, two small children take a nap in an Alpine meadow—only to wake up orphans in a world full of strangers. Moved from a Munich orphanage by their Aunt Charity, who was located after a protracted search, Con and Lordie enter a new life in which security and comfort are largely absent. Charity is a drifter and a drunk, pretty enough to attract a series of ``uncles'' but too unstable to hold down a job. Led from one living situation to another in the Chicago area before coming to a tenuous roost in a dingy South Side apartment, Con and Lordie rely on each other for support, creating their own fantasy world with its separate language, a pidgin German-English. When Charity (having changed her name to Cherry) periodically hits bottom, she takes it out on her charges, leaving physical and psychological scars that barely heal before she batters them anew, but as they age they toughen and become more rebellious. Con gains a boyfriend in a black neighbor, who brings her to a dynamic blind ex-con seeking to reclaim the 'hood for his people, and both she and Lordie find refuge in his plans and dreams until he is gunned down. Eventually, Cherry, raving and debilitated, has to be institutionalized; with the aid of a wealthy family friend, Con and Lordie begin to make a fresh start in Boston, until Cherry comes back to them, and a battle to break free from her tyranny ends in her death. A moving portrait—acid-etched and bleakly real—of a severely dysfunctional family, although its fragmentary nature makes it seem more scrapbook than well-integrated fiction.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-877946-30-3
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
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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