A potentially fascinating tale of cross-generational, multiracial, and cross-border conflicts is dissipated through pallid...
A border patrolman finds out about his past while the reader finds out little.
James Santana rides along a stretch of the Mexican border hunting down illegal aliens. The fight to hold back the torrents of humanity from making their way into the US has taken its toll on James. Half-Mexican himself, he is mocked by the aliens, and his past is a mess—a series of foster homes, the last depositing him in this small California town, juvenile delinquency and a stretch in the Navy. His present isn’t much better. Besides the conflict he feels on the job, his marriage to the gorgeous and stubborn Mercedes seems on the rocks, and he’s got a not-so-small torch for a woman at the office. Haunting him also are the coyotes, the feral-eyed opportunists who extort money from aliens to get them across the border—and betray them to bandits or leave them, lost and wandering in the desert. At story’s start, James appears to be heading for a confrontation with Anteater, one of the more foul of the coyotes. Unfortunately, though, second-novelist Palmer (All Saints, 1997) takes James on a trip into his past, triggered by the discovery of the body of a young boy on the farm of the man who raised him—illegally. Around the same time, James gets a letter from a lawyer telling him that his birth mother has died and he’s her sole heir. Usually, this might be a way of getting to the bottom of the taciturn James, but the task is beyond Palmer’s powers. The deeper the story goes into the tangles of James’s true family history, the less interesting the book gets. Even a final act with James sneaking into the US disguised as an alien himself fails to bring much to the table.
A potentially fascinating tale of cross-generational, multiracial, and cross-border conflicts is dissipated through pallid characterizations and meek storytelling.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56947-315-3
Page Count: 305
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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
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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