Deep and real.
Superheated Seattle is the setting for a wise story of ethics and family affection.
Everyone around him seems to be raking in zillions for nothing more than a concept or a fortunate pre-bubble home purchase, but Dr. Henry Moss has been too distracted by his lifetime of work in a backwater of medical research to get in on the gold rush. His study of children cursed with Hickman syndrome, the horrifying genetic problem that zooms infants into old age without passing go, has proven rewarding only in its contacts with the ancient youngsters and their bewildered and adoring families. The number of victims is too tiny to rate a telethon, but the study is fascinating. Now, though, there may be hope. The family of a recently presented Hickman child also includes a son who has the fatal gene combination but shows no symptoms. Thomas is, in fact, uncannily healthy, thanks probably to an extra genetic factor that seems to erase aging. Building his story around Moss’s unethical use of the miracle gene to help the wonderfully winning William Durbin, a Hickman child nearing the end of his expected life span, first-novelist Byers (stories: The Coast of Good Intentions, 1998) includes the lesser but absolutely real dilemmas faced by the Moss family’s Ilse, a nonpracticing Austrian physician; Sandra, a basketball phenom; and Darren, smart, a little geeky, and William Durbin’s secret link to the normal world. No one is overdrawn, everyone is as real and worth knowing as he or she can be. Ilse is looking for her place in a country she would never have chosen for herself were it not for Henry, and the children are looking for their spots in the only country that they could possibly understand. What may upset their applecart is the possibility that the anti-Hickman gene may be their ticket to the stupendous wealth that is washing through the American bloodstream.
Deep and real.Pub Date: June 9, 2003
ISBN: 0-395-89171-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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