Fast, witty, and fun: highly entertaining but also highly forgettable.
A fortune-hunting scoundrel helps solve a murder case, in a picaresque thriller from Irish writer Collins (The Keepers of Truth, not reviewed, etc.).
Frank Cassidy is not the most sentimental guy in the world, so when he learns that his uncle Ward has been murdered, his first thought is the inheritance: Frank had gone to live with Ward’s family as a boy after his own parents died in a house fire, and now he figures he can claim a chunk of Ward’s farm. On Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula, the farm is now being run by Frank’s cousin Norman, who naturally refuses to send Frank money to come out from New Jersey to dispute his claim to the estate. But that’s not enough to stop Frank, who proceeds to make the trip (in the company of his wife Honey, stepson Robert Lee, and son Ernie) in a succession of stolen cars, eating food pilfered from rest-stop vending machines. In Michigan, Frank is astonished to learn that Ward’s suspected murderer is believed to be Chester Green, a boyhood friend from a neighboring farm who was thought to have died years ago. But the question of identity is a tricky one: the suspect tried to hang himself in prison and is now sunk in a deep coma, and an exhumation shows Chester Green’s coffin to be empty. And there are more complications, involving “resurrectionists” (grave robbers) and the true fate of Frank’s father in that fire of so many years ago. Even poor, hapless Norman—a truly innocent-seeming man who wants nothing more than to keep the farm he grew up on for himself and his family—comes under police suspicion. Maybe a situation as duplicitous as this can be made sense of only by a sleazy, dishonest scumbag—like Frank. You have to send a thief to catch one, right?
Fast, witty, and fun: highly entertaining but also highly forgettable.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2904-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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