A too faithful retelling that, despite some vivid moments, ultimately has little life of its own.
The Iliad in the Irish borderlands during the final months of the Troubles.
Northern Ireland, 1996. Despite the cease-fire, Shane Campbell (alias Pig), the Officer Commanding of a Provisional IRA unit, is planning a strike on a nearby British Army garrison. Why? Because Pig’s sister-in-law Nellie, the wife of his brother Brian (alias Dog), has tarnished the Campbell name by turning “tout” (Loyalist/British agent) and then running away to England with her handler. Sound familiar? Just you wait. The action opens with a disagreement between Pig and Liam O’Brien (unsubtle alias: Achill). After Pig is forced to return “his girl” to her father, a local Protestant landowner, he decides that he must have Achill’s girl as a replacement. Achill—the famed Border Sniper, hugely feared by the IRA’s enemies—rebels against Pig’s tyranny by putting down his arms, an act which emboldens the British (the best of whom is SAS Capt. Henry Morrow) to set an ambush for Pig’s team. The rest is…well…The Iliad. And that’s the problem. Writing in a fast-paced Irish lilt, debut bard Hughes is at his best (which, mind you, can be good) when he’s least faithful to his Homeric blueprint. His reimagining of Helen (here Nellie) is especially striking, showing how a young woman’s search for freedom ends up entangling her (because abortions are illegal) in the very place and conflict from which she seeks escape. But Nellie’s section is, alas, an exception. Hughes is faithful to Homer’s story at the expense of his own. His characters are not themselves but proxies for the Homeric originals; they don the armor and read the lines but are lacking in on-the-page emotional complexity. Similarly, dozens of scenes are included to simply check off their corresponding plot box in The Iliad—and therefore deliver very little affect of their own. The result? The novel, despite its promising start, quickly devolves into a litany of allusions. Look! The Republican pub is called the Ships! Look! The British fort is called Castle William but some kids monkeyed with the sign and now it reads “Castle Illiam!” Look! Pat (nee Patroclus) is literally wearing Achill’s body armor! Look! Achill, the famed long-distance sniper, has literally chased Henry three times around Illiam’s walls on foot!
A too faithful retelling that, despite some vivid moments, ultimately has little life of its own.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-294032-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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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