Vernon’s vision is relentless, nearly misanthropic, often unintelligible except at a second reading. Altogether, Logic is...
Second-novelist Vernon (Eden, 2003) reveals her southern antecedents in Faulkner and Morrison in a desperately sad tale of a retarded, abused young black girl in hopeless Valsin County, Mississippi.
Thirteen-year-old Logic Harris fell from a tree and has never since been right in the head—she asks her mother, Too, a local midwife and white woman’s maid, how to spell “heaven.” Logic’s father David Harris, a laconic, repressed man who works in the woodyard, has rejected Too and sexually abuses Logic, who believes that “a cloud of butterflies” floats in her stomach: she may or may not be pregnant. In any event, nobody seems to notice as her belly swells, whether from pregnancy or malnutrition. Across the street live a sick prostitute, George, and her four unschooled children from different fathers; George’s visits from “the man made of paper” provide the narrative with some fodder, especially in George’s oldest son, called merely “the tallest,” who likes to dress in his mother’s clothes and is the sole character who seems to understand and care for Logic. Little happens in this slim, richly metaphorical, nearly unreadable narrative, yet it holds the reader by its truly daring if not always successful figurative leaps (“The sun had risen into an unkept alphabet”). Logic speaks in parables, like Jesus, and indeed is compared to an innocent sacrificial lamb; she carries around wire hangers she wants her mother’s employer, the Missis, to help her fashion into butterfly wings. As in Vernon’s debut, a brutality fed by poverty and ignorance barely simmers under the surface, and acts of violence are likely to erupt at any moment—as with the appearance of an ex-con to delineate the Harris property in barbed wire, a man who himself is haunted by the homosexual savagery he suffered from in prison.
Vernon’s vision is relentless, nearly misanthropic, often unintelligible except at a second reading. Altogether, Logic is like an early effort, before the author could hone her vision.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1771-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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