A scathing romp about late capitalism’s social ills.
A hapless writer avoids jail time by signing up for a suspicious life-skills scheme called The Transition.
Karl Temperley spends his days writing fake online reviews for products like the “Smart Fridge” and “a retro-look anti-SAD desk lamp.” He and his wife, vulnerable primary school teacher Genevieve, scrape by thanks to a carefully orchestrated “seventeen-card private Ponzi scheme.” Like plenty of real-life counterparts, Karl finds that his balancing act allows him to enjoy middle-class comfort despite crippling credit card debt. When Karl accidentally commits a crime “somewhere between fraud and tax evasion and incompetence,” The Transition offers an easy alternative to a prison sentence. Smooth, futuristic, and cultlike, The Transition relaunches white-collar criminals and social screw-ups back into society with new homes and stylish careers. Karl and Genevieve are paired with “mentors,” the successful, sexy Stu and Janna , who flirt, cajole, and coerce the couple into a simulacrum of adulthood: reading newspapers, budgeting, and exercise. Before long, the cracks in the scheme begin to show. What at first seemed generous—oversight from Stu and Janna, regulatory AA–like meetings—turns sinister and constrictive. A mysterious message carved onto Karl’s bedframe sends him searching for answers, but will the quest alienate him further from Genevieve or land him in hot water with The Transition? Despite careful initial plotting and plenty of compelling character details, Kennard’s imaginative satire begins to unravel as Karl seeks more information—and the destruction of The Transition. Karl’s quixotic detective work prematurely accelerates the end of the novel, though fans of droll English commentary with a dystopian kick will find much to enjoy in this debut novel from an acclaimed British poet.
A scathing romp about late capitalism’s social ills.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-27871-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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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