The hopeless task of disciplining two unruly slackers (which is just one of its clever title’s implied meanings) gives substance—and allegorical form—to this flinty first novel by a British writer whose grim humor has been compared to that of Irvine Welsh. But Mills uses kitchen-sink realism as means rather than end in his curiously fashioned tale of the strange symbiotic relationship binding its narrator—the English foreman of a Scottish company that installs “high-tension fences”—with his obstreperous charges Tam and Richie: skilled laborers who —could only work in the day if they had beer to look forward to at night.” The plot therefore consists of reiterated descriptions of exhausting workdays endured in mostly miserable weather, and compulsive pub-crawling in which the initially reserved narrator becomes an increasingly willing crawl participant. A horrendous accident deftly shifts the story’s stark tone—but when it’s repeated with only minimal variations, the carefully laid naturalistic surface parts, throwing Tam, Richie, and their boss into the region of Kafkaesque nightmare. Later, at a job in England, a further sequence of “accidents” puts them in thrall to Hall Brothers (the local “fencers”), a mysteriously diversified company that gradually discloses its expertise at building livestock pens and —electrified cages” (for less obvious purposes), and eventually to work as arbiters with the task of bringing the alien fencers to judgment. Until its enigmatic closing pages, the novel works nicely as a taut little drama of rebellion against the injunction that “All fences had to be straight” (one thinks of the similar metaphoric action in Alan Sillitoe’s “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner”). But the expansion of the story’s simple contours spells out too much, and blurs its haunting suggestiveness. All the same, a strongly imagined and more than promising first effort.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55970-437-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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