Very cerebral and rather obvious.
From novelist (Harry Gold, 2000) and biographer Dillon (Paul Bowles, et al.): a spare psychoanalytical tale constructed much like a “serious art film,” with ambiguous scenes and loaded dialogue.
It’s circa 1960, and Lorle, a divorced mother, is in a car with her lover Edmund on an overnight trip to California’s gold country. Adoring Edmund, she can’t stop analyzing his every gesture, even as he avoids intense dialogue. When the car breaks down, they must leave it at a local garage and fly home. A man named Vern gives them a ride to the airport. Later, Vern invites Edmund to come pan for gold, but Edmund rebuffs him. Back in the city, Lorle sees a note on Edmund’s door signed “Love, Carol” and is inflamed with jealousy. Soon Edmund, who was previously Lorle’s analyst, breaks off with her and marries Carol because Carol offers him peace. He recommends a new analyst to Lorle, who grows emotionally stronger while Edmund weakens. When he visits Lorle, they make love but she gives him an ultimatum: not to visit again unless he calls by Saturday. Before the deadline, he has a fatal heart attack. Meanwhile, Vern, who, like Edmund, has not emotionally recovered from his WWII experiences, lives cut off from his past—in a cabin—until visited by his boyhood friend Neal. On a return visit to Neal in the city, he meets a woman who’s opening a resort in Mexico. His lonely life no longer satisfying, he looks up Lorle and invites her to Mexico. She accepts, though she’d refused to do the same with Edmund, fearing too much strangeness. In Mexico, Vern and Lorle find great sexual chemistry, he now obsessed with her the way she’d been with Edmund, she disengaged just as Edmund had been. Frustrated and angry, Vern storms out. Driving around, he saves some people in fire. When he returns, he and Lorle find a bittersweet peace and head home.
Very cerebral and rather obvious.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05216-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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