The narrative lacks thrust, and the flight could be less controlled, but it shows promise of better work to come, once the...
Air Force flyer wrestles with her demons during Desert Storm.
In carefully cadenced prose, debut novelist Ponders diffidently explores the fallout from only-child Annie Shaw’s relationship with the distant, cold father she reveres. He was a pilot and Air Force veteran, and Annie wanted to emulate him even as a child, when she preferred eavesdropping on war stories to passing hors d’oeuvres at her parents’ cocktail parties. However, when her father’s infidelities seemingly lead to her mother’s death, she and ruggedly handsome Dad become transients, living with a succession of his mistresses and wives. The section expounding Annie’s childhood is more engrossing than those detailing Annie’s experiences as an Air Force Academy cadet and an anomalous female pilot deployed to Saudi Arabia after the invasion of Kuwait. The military scenes suffer from an excess of downtime and acronyms. A mostly extraneous middle section follows the careers of Annie’s male comrades as they switch war zones, from Kosovo to Kandahar. There are some gripping moments, including a mission during which Annie inadvertently exposes her crew to a missile attack. The affectless narration jumps around in time and shifts from first- to third-person point of view, but the protagonist’s secret self is always held close to her flight vest. A detached reportorial voice, emphasizing physical detail more than psychological depth, glosses over Annie’s feelings of guilt after her mother dies in a house fire. Similarly undocumented are the course of her estrangement from her father and the reasons she married thinly sketched Dexter. When the missile mishap results in a medal rather than court martial thanks to the intervention of ex-lover Jago, Annie’s feelings about the deception are obscured because the facts are laid out so dispassionately.
The narrative lacks thrust, and the flight could be less controlled, but it shows promise of better work to come, once the author stops withholding.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-078608-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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