This emotional high-wire act should have readers racing to the end.
A novel plunges a newly acquainted grandfather and granddaughter into adventures on the French canals.
Colin Aylesford of Bath, England, hasn’t seen his son, Michael, in almost 10 years. One day, he receives a letter from his boy stating that Charlotte, his wife, has died in an accident. Delphine, Michael and Charlotte’s 9-year-old daughter, is “coping as well as possible.” More than a month later, Colin learns from the police that Michael has been arrested in France in connection with his wife’s lethal trip down a flight of stairs. He’s also confessed to pushing her. Colin takes the small fishing boat he’s built—the Dragonfly—south, into the French canals. By special arrangement with Charlotte’s mother, Delphine joins him for the summer. The coupling proves exceptionally awkward, because Colin himself is a widower and has lived for years as a bachelor. Delphine is a precocious young lady who requires entertainment and careful attention paid to Amandine, her sock monkey. In prison, meanwhile, Michael reflects on a life spent without his own father after a deep estrangement sundered his parents decades ago. Later on the canals, Colin and Delphine meet Tyler, an American woman traveling alone who soon becomes instrumental in the relationship between Colin and his granddaughter. In this novel of quietly revealed passions, Dunn (Rebecca’s Children, 2016, etc.) gives audiences an experience that resists categorization. It reads like a special sort of coming-of-age tale for parents with either an empty nest or damaged families, in that Colin feels “stranded on the shore of his son’s life.” The pain of not raising his son returns with Delphine, who shares with Michael “the set of her jaw...her wide mouth, and her slightly crooked teeth.” While a good deal of levity is present, especially when Delphine utters her starchy catchphrase, “It is not possible,” Dunn’s story features dense layers of melancholy (Colin “felt sadness like a sharp blade drawn along the length of him”). Sunlight reaches the canals, but not before a gasp-inducing finale.
This emotional high-wire act should have readers racing to the end.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-911501-03-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Aurora Metro Press
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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