Reams of expository dialogue punctuated by spasmodic bursts of action: more talk than thrill.
The assassin is a woman, but aside from that it’s pretty much your granddaddy’s genre all over again.
Having escaped the clutches of her Magenta House spymasters (The Rhythm Section, 2000), lethal though lovely Stephanie Patrick is rusticating somewhere in the French countryside. She’s got an undemanding lover and the kind of sweetly pastoral life that’s gone a long way toward helping her forget she once killed people for a living. But here comes icy old Alexander, who used to run her, invading her backwater and blasting tranquility into yesterday. He’s been dispatched from Magenta House to bring Stephanie back into the fold for one last job. She’s to find and eliminate the mysterious Koba, an international terrorist who has brutally eliminated one of Magenta House’s own. And Magenta House wants payback. Make that happen, Alexander promises, and Stephanie will be struck off Magenta House rolls for all time. She takes the deal. First requisite is to scrape away the rust that rustication results in. She goes back into training, an arduous process described at great length. But at last she’s ready to pursue Koba, who is as much a professional chameleon as Stephanie herself. The hunt begins in New York, where one Konstantin Komarov proves a lot easier to find than Koba does—both a good thing and bad. Good because Stephanie falls desperately in love with the rich, romantic Russian racketeer, bad because, apparently, even the best professional assassins find it hard to be single-minded when they’re desperately in love. Magenta House, however, has no tolerance for such folderol, and Stephanie is forced to push on, leaving Konstantin to fend for himself—until, in the denouement, he plays a role that surprises him although it may not most readers.
Reams of expository dialogue punctuated by spasmodic bursts of action: more talk than thrill.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019466-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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