Forget the ark, forget the patriarch. It’s the women who tend to triumph in this modern take on an Old Testament parable.
There’s an endless amount of rain, animals from a once-renowned and now ruined zoo, various boats, and a man of God named Noah. But this isn’t your average biblical flood scenario.
First of all, the setting for Starck’s debut is the United States, primarily a spot that was once a charming tourist destination in the hills but which, after the nonstop downpour, has become a moldering ghost town. Second, the era is modern, complete with TVs, trucks, and a visiting state weatherman who warns the townsfolk that no end to the rain is in sight and that they are doomed unless they evacuate within the next week. Charismatic, joyful, energetic minister Noah has arrived, along with his wife, after the previous minister’s death—was it suicide?—with a simple mission: to do some good. But can his faith triumph where another has succumbed? Starck’s unusual, often charmingly phrased fable is constructed around the responses of a band of individuals to life’s unpredictable challenges. The townsfolk who stay on—loyal zookeeper Adam, sincere Italian storekeeper Mauro, indomitable diner-owner Mrs. McGinn—show their mettle as the fabric of their lives and homes crumbles away, even billeting the zoo animals after their quarters are inundated. There’s comedy in the penguins lodging in Mrs. McGinn’s walk-in freezer and tragedy as Noah falters in the face of the onslaught. But Starck’s story has largely upbeat messages to deliver: the animals point out a path to safety; the community comes together; true hearts are conjoined; and Mrs. Noah rallies the rescue forces. Variously romantic, symbolic, philosophical, feminist, and fanciful, this is an atmospheric tale that meanders to a sweetly rousing conclusion.
Forget the ark, forget the patriarch. It’s the women who tend to triumph in this modern take on an Old Testament parable.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-15923-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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
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