When the book’s set in Sydney, it’s good; when it shifts to other locales, it's less compelling.
A willful Australian girl falls in love with a black soldier during World War II and battles to keep the relationship afloat in Sayer’s inconsistent historical romance (Dreamtime Alice, 1998, etc.).
A year after Pearl Willis dies, her nephew Jimmy discovers a cache of audio tapes she left for him. Much to his surprise, the tapes contain a detailed autobiography, a story that, as she tells him on the tape, she tried many times to write, but somehow couldn’t. Instead, she hopes that Jimmy, an author, will do the job for her. As he listens to each tape, Jimmy learns the true story of Pearl and her twin brother, Martin, both accomplished jazz musicians who play saxophone at a fancy club and sometimes sit in on gigs at an underground night club. It’s at one of these gigs that young Pearl meets James Washington, a black GI who’s recorded with some of the most famous jazz musicians of the era. The smitten couple is denied permission to wed, so they decide to run away together. But their plans are thwarted when James has second thoughts and is transferred to Queensland. Never fear, though. Pearl’s one determined Aussie who’s not about to let racism or war keep her from her man. Seizing opportunity, she shrugs off a botched suicide attempt and her reluctant engagement to the doctor who treated her and concocts a new plan to reunite with James, who’s now been transferred to a unit in New Guinea. Pearl should have stayed in Sydney and waited out the war for her hero’s return, since unfortunately, it’s at this point that the book begins a downward slide with repetitious action, naïve characters and ludicrous behaviors bogging down the core of the story until, blessedly, the book grinds its way to a predictable conclusion. By the end, it’s Pup the dog who deserves the most sympathy: She certainly wouldn’t be wagging her tail so much if she could see into her future.
When the book’s set in Sydney, it’s good; when it shifts to other locales, it's less compelling.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7846-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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
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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