There were those who admired The Edible Woman, while Surfacing—post-discovery chic?—attracted still more attention. This is by far the most cheerful novel Margaret Atwood's written—picking up themes and traces of her former books while subduing the determined, symbolic Millettantism of her second one. Lady Oracle is entertainment de luxe (even a Redbook appearance)—she's Joan Foster, once the very unwanted, fat child of an awful mother who had wretched experiences with everyone except her loving Aunt Lou (e.g. the time her dancing teacher converted her from a butterfly into a mothball which was what she looked like in all that tulle). She reviews the almost "discarded misery" of her childhood and puberty in which she had to suppress sex—there was no role for her to play—until she dieted drastically and moved on to England, still the insecure romantic looking for happy endings. A Polish count who wrote girls' books under the name Mavis Quilp led her to write her own costume gothics. But earlier on (through Aunt Lou's spiritualist) she had been told she had the gift; it comes true when she begins the automatic writing which results in her great best seller, Lady Oracle, a "cross between Kahlil Gibran and Rod McKuen" and winner of cult catchwords like "chthonic." There is also her marriage to Arthur, a mournful, radical prig, which seems to take place "in a kind of spiritual train station," without many sensual highs. Finally Joan Foster decides to do away with all her secret selves and fantasy heroines by preparing her demise into another world and another life. Miss Atwood's eye for detail is as acute as ever; it's just that this book is a genuine mood-softener as well as raffishly funny. Lady Oracle's automatic reading—a charming certainty.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1976
ISBN: 0385491085
Page Count: -
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1976
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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