The Sixth Sense meets Thelma and Louise.
A brief but slow-reading third outing by Hepinstall (The Absence of Nectar 2001, etc.) pits maternal love against rational thought. Mom wins.
In Ohio, a distraught man named David hires a private detective to find his missing wife Martha, traumatized since a bomb went off—killing some—at their six-year-old son Duncan’s elementary school. Unbeknownst to David, Martha has arrived at an isolated desert cave in Texas where she hopes to protect Duncan from the dangers of the world. A florist, she learned about the sanctuary from one of her clients, an old man who taught her that “loved ones don’t die on their own; we let them die. We violate some rule.” Although she loves David, Martha has left him behind because he refused to accept her increased protectiveness toward Duncan and forced her to visit a psychiatrist, who sides with him. She arrives at the cave with two months’ worth of food (an unbelievable feat in itself), plenty of candles, and a John Denver CD. With incredible ease, she settles into the primitive life, spending her days fishing, teaching Duncan to read, and swimming in a lake full of blind fish. Then a handsome stranger—the detective—shows up, bearing the chocolate bars Duncan loves. He has also assumed the first name of Martha’s father, whose death in a hit-and-run accident she feels she caused by not psychically protecting him. The detective, haunted by his own dark past, gradually wins Martha’s trust but is equally seduced by the passionate sureness of her life. By now, most readers will have realized that Duncan died in the bombing and Martha has come to the desert because there no one can stop her from believing he’s still alive. When David shows up—or does he?—things get even murkier, for Martha must choose which reality—or unreality—she wants more.
The Sixth Sense meets Thelma and Louise.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-14936-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
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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