A tone of hysteria rules this dank, claustrophobic story.
Wicked stepfather threatens the lives of an unbearably wise prepubescent girl and her saintly brother: a second novel by Hepinstall that, like her first (The House of Gentle Men, 2000), displays a disquieting view of virile manhood.
After a black-haired stranger named Simon saves divorced and somewhat depressed Meg Fendar from drowning, Meg and her son Boone are both thrilled to have him enter their lives. Weak, dependent Meg, who has barely functioned since her husband deserted the family for another woman, responds unquestioningly to Simon’s advances. Deeply religious and emotionally open, Boone is touched by Simon’s tragic tale about his wife and child's accidental drowning. Not Boone’s younger sister Alice, the narrator; she immediately distrusts Simon’s story and suspects that his slimy charms mask rage and paranoia. But Alice is helpless to prevent Simon’s deepening involvement with Meg, who’s desperate to hang on to him despite his increasingly erratic behavior. They marry, and once Meg is pregnant Simon’s hostility toward her children increases. Alice and Boone begin to suspect that he wants them dead, but Meg remains passive, turning a blind eye until tensions in the household escalate into violence. Meanwhile, Boone, who believes good exists in everyone, has been corresponding with a teenaged girl imprisoned for poisoning her parents. When she shows up unexpectedly, Simon’s secret past becomes clear. The kids attempt escape through a series of dark adventures that obviously allude to Huckleberry Finn. Hepinstall’s real inspiration, however, is nothing so morally complex as Twain’s novel but rather the fairy tales in which good is clearly distinct from evil. From Simon to policemen and random strangers, her male characters are either pathetically weak or dangerously powerful, and even 14-year-old Boone is a relative wimp compared to his sister and criminal girlfriend.
A tone of hysteria rules this dank, claustrophobic story.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14801-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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