“Ambivalent relationships” among an embattled extended family whose confusions are mirrored and reshaped by the past are the intriguing matter of this eighth by the Booker-winning British author of, most recently, the Regeneration trilogy. The opening pages patiently expose the tensions that begin crackling when 13-year-old Miranda, middle-aged schoolteacher Nick’s daughter (by his ex-wife Barbara), comes to visit Nick, his present (and pregnant) wife Fran, their two-year-old Jasper, and preadolescent computer-game fanatic Gareth, Fran’s son by her ex. Barker sorts through these and other equally intricate particulars with commendable economy, while simultaneously constructing a rich narrative that’s as attentive to the kitchen-sink minutiae of domestic frustration (such as buying kids’ shoes) as to her story’s more immediately dramatic matters. These include the family’s accidental discovery, while stripping old wallpaper away, of a disturbing pornographic painting beneath it—presumably of the wealthy Fanshawes, the original owners of their house; Nick’s consequent realization that an alleged child murder may have occurred “where they live and sleep and eat”; and—in the novel’s boldest revelation of how the past continuously grips the present—the long death-in-life of Nick’s centenarian grandfather Geordie. A WWI veteran who compulsively mourns the comrades killed decades ago (“Every August 31st I’d say the lads’ names over to meself”), Geordie also keeps reliving the battlefield death of his brother Harry, which resonates enigmatically in his memory and conscience. That heritage of loss and its lingering aftereffects are shown—with flinty clarity—in all their complex relation to Nick and his loved ones, though Barker’s lovely conclusion paradoxically affirms the “wisdom . . . [of] let[ting] the innocent and the guilty . . . lie together beneath their half-erased names . . . under the obliterating grass.” Of such imaginative complexity and generosity are first-rate fiction made, and Barker keeps on making it about as well as anybody now writing.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-374-10525-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
