This elegant novel’s true subject is its evolving pastoral setting, which is richer than its tableau of underdeveloped...
Harrison (Clay, 2013) describes the small details and grand scope of nature in the hills and forests of Lodeshill, a village north of London, where multiple narratives of longing and loss converge.
The book ends and begins with the car accident that brings together disparate characters inhabiting the same landscape. Jack, who has been tramping for more than 20 years, returns to Lodeshill on foot, looking for seasonal work picking asparagus on one of its farms. Afraid of being caught skipping out on his prison release terms and arrested for trespassing, he sleeps in the woods and walks at night. Jack isn’t just disconnected from other people; he's deeply in tune with the Earth’s rhythms, noting them in journals; “it wasn’t just about staying unseen; it was a way to immerse himself in a world that most people didn’t know existed.” Kitty and Howard, married transplants, don’t know much about Lodeshill when they retire there to fulfill Kitty’s dream of country living. An aspiring painter, she immerses herself in local customs and history while her husband struggles to find his place in the village and in his marriage. Jamie, a young man who grew up in Lodeshill dreaming of a life on its farms, works robotically at a warehouse job, putting his passion into customizing his car. The impending sale of a farm with significance for both Jack and Jamie casts a shadow over the plot’s slow burn. Jamie’s grandfather, a former prisoner of war, captures the reader’s interest but is unfortunately one of many minor characters competing for attention.
This elegant novel’s true subject is its evolving pastoral setting, which is richer than its tableau of underdeveloped characters.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62040-994-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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