Nothing revelatory, but Drabble’s fans will savor these bite-sized examples of her humane intelligence.
Fourteen stories published over four decades offer an agreeable supplement to the distinguished British novelist’s full-length fiction (The Sea Lady, 2007, etc.).
The early pieces from the 1960s show Drabble’s (The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws, 2009, etc.) smooth, reflective prose style already well developed as she focuses on the difficulties of marriage and the temptations of infidelity. "Hassan’s Tower” is a grimly funny tale of a couple already mired in mutual hostility while honeymooning in Morocco; the overseas journey of adulterous lovers in “Crossing the Alps” is nearly as disastrous, for different reasons. The title story (the collection’s best) echoes the feminism-tinged novels in which Drabble reached her prime (Jerusalem the Golden, 1967; The Needle’s Eye, 1972), thoughtfully exploring the life of a modern woman prompted by a cancer scare to reconsider her complicated juggling of commitments to work, a difficult husband and her adored children. Similar ground is covered with even more bite in “Homework,” narrated by the envious, sniping “friend” of a successful but overstressed career woman. The sharp social consciousness that became an increasing feature of Drabble’s work beginning with The Ice Age (1977) is less evident in her short fiction, although “The Gifts of War” stingingly juxtaposes a beleaguered working-class mother with two patronizing student protestors, and the linked stories “The Dower House at Kellynch: A Somerset Romance” and “Stepping Westward: A Topographical Tale” show middle-class women encountering glamorous representatives of the English landed gentry. Drabble can be acid, as when a woman unforgivingly recalls her dead husband’s many petty cruelties in “The Merry Widow,” but more often her tone is warm. “The Caves of God,” which closes with the protagonist’s tender reunion with her ex-husband more than a decade after their divorce, is characteristically gentle about human failings and hopeful about the possibility of redemption and reconciliation.
Nothing revelatory, but Drabble’s fans will savor these bite-sized examples of her humane intelligence.Pub Date: May 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-55040-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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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