One of our great writers at her challenging, blistering best. Mandatory reading.
The 1991 Nobel winner’s 14th novel is one of her most provocative books: an unsparing analysis of the permutations—and ramifications—of commitment and fidelity, endangerment and survival.
Its initial crisis is the personal one afflicting 30ish white South African Paul Bannerman, an ecologist dedicated to protecting the pristine African environment from commercial overdevelopment. Diagnosed with malignant thyroid cancer, Bannerman is treated with a “destructive [chemical] substance” that renders him temporarily radioactive, removing him from contact with his wife Berenice (“Benni”) and young son and placing him under a kind of benign house arrest in the home of his still-nurturing parents Lyndsay and Adrian. Gordimer employs this confinement as a stage for revelations of her major characters’ contrasted and intertwined professional and personal lives. Benni is a successful advertising copywriter, whose clients include commercial enterprises her husband opposes. Paul’s father Adrian is a retired businessman with a passion for archaeology left unrequited during the early years of his long marriage to Lyndsay, who is still, in her 60s, a busy civil-rights lawyer. Gordimer has a tendency to tip her hand, and spell out themes (e.g., Benni’s lament “why must her man take on the survival of the whole bloody world, and now himself a threatened species?”). But her terse, slashing prose compels attention, and she shares Saul Bellow’s ability to make discursive commentary vividly dramatic. And as the novel’s initially simple plot cunningly exfoliates, Paul’s re-entry into the world of family and work encounters ironic complications, as does his parents’ seemingly rock-like marriage, which endures separation, failed communication and—in an irony worthy of Sophocles—Lyndsay’s accession to a judgeship. Yes, this is a talky novel, but if the conscience of South Africa hasn’t earned the right to have her say, who has?
One of our great writers at her challenging, blistering best. Mandatory reading.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-16170-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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