An all-but-vanished world is brought thrillingly to life, in one of the best debuts novels in recent memory.
The Canadian Arctic is the setting for this elegiac and intricately patterned first novel, the work of an Ontario short-story writer (Country of Cold, 2003, etc.) and memoirist.
More specifically, it’s the settlement of Rankin Inlet on the northwestern coast of Hudson Bay—to which a beautiful Inuit woman named Victoria returns to rejoin her family in the late 1960s, after six years spent in a Montreal hospital being treated for tuberculosis. The world of the Inlet is rapidly, irreversibly changing. Seal and fish populations dwindle as industrialism alters the environment. Victoria’s father Emo, a renowned hunter and trapper, has accepted work in a mine, relocating his family to subsistence-level government housing. As years pass, Victoria, who has married British settler John Robertson (manager of the town store) and borne him three surviving children, yearns nostalgically for the years of her confinement when easily available books stimulated her imagination, and watches as her daughters (Justine and Marie) adjust differently to confusing cultural pressures, and her son Pauloosie “retreats” to the elemental world of previous generations. When outside business interests prepare to cultivate diamonds detected in the frozen tundra, Robertson betrays the interests of “his” people—and the unraveling of his marriage to Victoria (who has long since taken an Inuit lover) incarnates in microcosm the disintegration of the old, stable Inuit ways. Patterson displays a real gift for blending scenic description and ethnographic detail with narrative and characterization, and his crisp depictions of events experienced and remembered expand to include stunning images (“Pauloosie’s snow machine, twinkling its way north”) and ruminations on medical and personal matters recorded in the “journal” kept by Keith Balthazar, an American doctor who has come to Rankin Inlet to help the Inuits survive.
An all-but-vanished world is brought thrillingly to life, in one of the best debuts novels in recent memory.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52074-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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