Sketchy, toneless family drama in the Northern hinterland.
Patchily contrived tale about surviving abandonment, from Canadian novelist den Hartog (Water Wings, 2004, etc.).
In 1960, aspiring 16-year-old gymnast Kay Clancy of small-town Deep River, Ontario, trampolines into the arms of a tall transient, Joe LeBlanc. Their fatal romance ruins her chances for an Olympic career, even though Joe is not responsible for Kay’s pregnancy. She lets him think the father is high-school footballer Robbie Hayes, but actually it’s her well-off, married coach, Russell Halliwell, who wants nothing further to do with her. Admirably, Joe accepts baby Estelle, marries Kay and sticks around for a while; two other children, Louis and Margar, result. However, the convoluted drama of Estelle’s conception continues to fuel Joe’s anger and jealousy and he finally takes off for good. Youngest child Margar grows up catching only glimpses of Joe during his furtive nocturnal visits to the house. Coach Halliwell’s only son, Eddie, is also adrift, troubled by a traumatic early memory of overhearing Kay and his father discuss the pregnancy. Each chapter in this oddly structured work begins with a short description of the Olympic game concurrent to the family action, from Rome in 1960 to Moscow in 1980. An equally peculiar leitmotif is the romance of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his wife: Margar wishes she had been named after glamorous Margaret Trudeau instead of boring Saint Margaret. Den Hartog blankly juxtaposes private and Olympic events without providing a thematic context to pull them together, and her characters lack warmth or dimension. In the end, readers may feel—like Margar, who eventually takes down her pictures of the estranged Trudeaus—that they have made an emotional investment in people who weren’t really worth it.
Sketchy, toneless family drama in the Northern hinterland.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-59692-145-5
Page Count: 280
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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