One of our topmost novelists writing at the peak of his powers.
Shortlisted for the Whitbread, nominated for the Booker: another fabulous ride through London’s recent history—here, the last four decades—that manages to be as sprawling as a Victorian social novel and as vigorous as an 18th-century picaresque.
Author of more than 70 novels (including the SF trilogy begun with Blood, 1995), Moorcock here picks up where he left off—artistically, not literally—with Mother London (1989). The story concerns three lives. Narrator Dennis Dover, son of the last Londoner hanged for murder, started out as a documentary photographer and ended up a sleazy paparazzo—and now, in newly sensitive, post-Di England—is unemployed. From this miserable perch, he takes a long, bitter, nostalgic, backwards look. Then there’s Rosie, Dennis’s cousin, whom Dennis dearly loves and who also, like Dennis, managed to pull herself out of working-class Brookgate. But most importantly, there’s John Barbican Begg, who has evolved, through genius and ruthless avarice, into a media magnate, one of the world’s wealthiest men. As these three move through the pop-riddled ’60s, through the years of drugs, assassinations, and social upheavals and on to Thatcherite England and the present day, Moorcock fills the tale with real characters and situations, made-up characters and situations, and those somewhere in between. Americans at times may feel they could use a concordance—presumably the Brits could figure it out for themselves when it was published in England last year—but you soon give up caring. Moorcock’s storytelling is just too powerful in a novel more than likely to invite comparisons to Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Certainly Moorcock strikes his big themes: sojourns to Africa and the Balkans echo with imperialism (both cultural and corporate) while contemporary London loses its soul to American-style consumerism. Yet at the same time King of the City is far more idiosyncratic than Wolfe’s book—and more successful because of it—with a strongly autobiographic feel. Dennis, Rosie, and John Begg never illustrate the fable, as Moorcock calls it, but it emerges completely through them.
One of our topmost novelists writing at the peak of his powers.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-380-97589-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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