Haddon deserves credit for taking chances even if not all of them pay off.
Time and connection are recurring themes in this story collection from the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003, etc.).
Since he made his debut with the popular Curious Incident, a murder mystery of sorts with an autistic young man as protagonist, Haddon has committed himself to a singularly twisted literary progression. Each book finds the British writer in a different place than the previous one had suggested, over a career that has encompassed children’s books and poetry as well as scripts for radio and television. Thus, it’s no surprise that his first story collection is all over the map in both form and quality. The two opening stories are among the best, with neither “The Pier Falls” nor “The Island” having anything as conventional as a named character. The former provides a tick-tock account of a tragedy, as the casualties accumulate and two survivors forge an unlikely connection, and then shifts into a longer-term perspective on the aftereffects. The latter is one of the stories in the collection where dreams blur with fairy tales, as a princess is abducted and abandoned by a man she assumes is her betrothed. “She realised that there were many worlds beyond this world and that her own was very small indeed,” he writes in a reflection that could apply to other stories as well. Yet some of the others are both more conventional and more contrived, as “Bunny” features another unlikely connection between a recluse and a woman who had been abused by her parents, “Wodwo” finds a holiday family dinner with predictable tensions interrupted by an unexpected stranger with surprising consequences, and the closing “The Weir” finds two other strangers coming together in unlikely circumstances and forging a bond, as “change gets harder,” with “the world shifting too fast in ways he doesn’t understand.”
Haddon deserves credit for taking chances even if not all of them pay off.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-54075-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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