Soggy and silly.
Young woman adrift on a sea of sophomoric philosophy.
Australian poet and second-novelist Davies (Candy, 1998) gives marine and freshwater metaphors quite a workout in this overly poetic coming-of-ager, moving from the sun-kissed beaches of Down Under to the stormy Atlantic and pausing for a stroll beside the Seine, whose flow inevitably (though inexplicably) reminds the brooding heroine of the lover who died in a motorcycle accident. Yes, Isabelle Airly has a lot to brood about: she’s a child of the fast-and-loose ’70s, still struggling to understand the reasons for her mother’s not-exactly-clandestine affair with Uncle Dan, her husband’s brother. Perhaps that’s why she floats in and out of relationships like a commitment-phobic guppy. And perhaps her mother’s affair was the reason her gentle, introspective physician father was jailed for bilking Medicare out of thousands of dollars and later committed suicide. Isabelle figures that he felt he just wasn’t as much of a man as Dan, a hearty, nonintrospective butcher in a bloodstained work-coat. Now, with nothing much to do, 22-year-old Isabelle gets high and watches a lot of undersea documentaries that spawn (sorry) still more oceanic epiphanies, thrilling to the knowledge that there is “a moment approaching orgasm when thought and emotion are stripped of all structure and form in a change as pervasive as the chromatic thermonuclear pulse of a cuttlefish coupling.” And she does her damnedest to hit that high as often as possible in order to feel connected to the world, however briefly. She and her lover “writhe together as if liquid,” but the pleasure is apparently only fleeting. Moving on to a lesbian affair with a Portuguese merchant marine captain still doesn’t scratch her constant urge to merge, though a tacked-on epilogue catches up with her several years later, happily married and heavily pregnant with her second child and feeling as if she is moving forward on an endless sea, at the prow of a ship . . . .
Soggy and silly.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-425-18604-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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
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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