Another unusual and original novel from Down Under.
This lively and increasingly engrossing second novel from the Australian author of The Salt of Broken Tears (2001) reinvents Shakespeare’s The Tempest as the story of a traveling vaudeville troupe’s impact on a remote northwestern backwater.
The action occurs on a single day in 1955, when the Blind Concert (a real-life group whose performances raised funds for blind people) pulls into the “one-horse town” of Towaninnie—led by an ostentatious Pontiac carrying aging “star” Leonard Barrington and his unhappy wife, a former concert soprano now very much out of her element. The opening chapters swiftly, skillfully introduce major characters, most of them are specific counterpart-echoes of Shakespeare’s originals. For instance, English-born flautist Amanda Jones, the troupe’s saxophone soloist and a suggestible maiden in search of True Love, is ingénue Miranda; the Barringtons’ scapegrace son Freddie, fleeing his gambling debts, will become the romantic hero redeemed by love; and the elderly “compere” who directs the performance, “his nose always stuck in his stupid books” as he contemplates retirement and the completion of his memoirs, is Meehan’s Prospero. The story’s most interesting figure is its Caliban: “the rabbiter,” a muscular, malicious orphaned recluse who lives in a festering swamp with his “beastly” dog Spot, amuses himself by playing outrageous pranks on the Towaninnians who loathe and fear him, and is himself transformed and exalted by the “magic” that’s displayed in the book’s lavish extended climax: a triumphant evening performance, following a day of unceasing rain—when “for a sacred moment world and stage were bound in feeling, and against all things of darkness.” It’s all more than a bit stagey, and the Shakespearean echoes sometimes feel forced. Nevertheless, Meehan’s constructive skill and empathy with his vivid characters’ makeshift vagrant lives make it all work surprisingly well.
Another unusual and original novel from Down Under.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-620-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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