Very subtle, almost Swiftian, satire that will go over the heads of most Americans—and even those who get it aren’t likely...
Mills’s fourth novel (after Three to See the King, 2001) is a kind of parody of British working-class life, where truck drivers are paid to deliver unneeded auto parts for other drivers to retrieve.
Talk about the Welfare State: The blue-collar yobs who work for the Scheme not only perform no useful labor whatsoever but want to cut corners doing it. The Scheme is a large labor project made up of vans, van drivers, van parts, and van depots. The drivers report to depots at eight in the morning and receive their vans, schedules, and cargoes, which they then drop off at other depots. It may seem like work, but it’s not, really, since all those parts simply circulate and are never used or replenished—rather like the water in a shopping-mall fountain. The Scheme is much admired by the British public and held almost sacred by those who work for it, but there are problems. The workforce is badly divided, with one group (the Flat-Dayers) insisting that no driver should go home early even if he finishes his rounds before five o’clock, and another group (the Swervers) holding that allowing the drivers to head home early will encourage promptness and efficiency. And there is (by British standards) a fair amount of corruption within the ranks—supervisors who wink at drivers hauling private cargoes in exchange for a cut of the goods, and so on. The unnamed narrator is a veteran, having driven for five years, and he tries to keep out of the internal divisiveness and strife, but when the Flat-Dayers call a strike, he’s forced to make his stand. It will cost him trouble either way, not to mention a few friendships, but this is the price of being a decent Briton on the dole.
Very subtle, almost Swiftian, satire that will go over the heads of most Americans—and even those who get it aren’t likely to rupture themselves with laughter.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-42163-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
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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