An enthusiastic reception should await Ellmann’s third (Sweet Deserts, 1989, etc.), a unique hodge-podge of love, lust, and death whose protagonist has one foot in the grave and a lonely ache in her heart. Eloise has moved from London to a remote country house (bought from an inheritance after her father’s suicide) where she neurotically shuns all contact with the world. When she is forced to interact with, say, even just the milkman or grocer, significant recovery time is required—ranging from minutes to days. Meanwhile, alternate chapters are narrated by George, an ex-Boston baker now living in London and working on an epic poem about ice hockey—and looking for Eloise. Gradually revealed is the passionate tryst the two had earlier, when Eloise was on a fall foliage tour of New England. After being rebuffed by George, she withdrew from the world to live with her three cats while George went on to write raunchy rhymes about her and about the finer points of sports violence. The story’s second section offers narrative snippets told by a variety of curious figures, including Ed, a half-witted mail-bomb terrorist who raises giant vegetables for competition; Owen and Ellen, a father and his young daughter undone by the sadness and danger of life; the Evil Doctor who “killed” Eloise’s parents, and his seething Egyptian wife; and The 3 Old Biddies, who take holidays to steal novelty tea towels. All of these converge, each for their own separate reasons, in self-consciously literary Connemara, where the magic of love and death ensnares every one of them. Ellmann, filling her story with curious lists (of Nazi loot, the death toll of the Irish famine, the major catastrophes of Great Britain, etc.), diagrams, poems, and bits from failed BBC plays, draws from her diverse materials a poignant and witty interpretation of life as we know it. At once bawdy and moving, an unusual and witty novel that offers an unsparing examination of the complexities of the heart.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-19083-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
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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