In a carefully crafted but overwrought first novel, an American midwife experiencing compassion fatigue cannot escape the claims of love and duty. Henly’s stary, a not-so-subtle homily on the evils of war, capitalism, and the US government, should outrage—it’s a tale of violence against children and well-meaning political activists—but its characters are too one-dimensional to be compelling. Fortyish Kate Banner, an American midwife now living in the Guatemala highlands, has always wanted to help the less fortunate. Prompted by a visit from her first lover, Paul, she recalls the events that brought her and street child Marta to Guatemala eight years ago, after Kate had first worked in refugee camps in Mexico, then Nicaragua. But after a long romance (with Deaver, a weapons supplier to the rebels) ended, and a young mother whose baby she delivered unexpectedly died, she felt she had to get away. She was worn out, she told Mar°a, a colleague and friend who suggested she go to Guatemala, where friends had a house. Once there, Kate found she had to share lodgings with attractive Father Dixie Ryan, on a leave of absence from the Church. Though still emotionally drained, Kate is soon helping Vidal£z, whose activist husband, Hector, has been unlawfully detained, and the traumatized street-child Marta. She is also increasingly attracted to Dixie, and a series of crises——Kate is briefly arrested, Mar°a and her lover are killed, and Hector brutally murdered—bring them together, and they move, along with Marta, to Hummingbird House, a farm Dixie hopes to turn into a cooperative when he leaves the priesthood. But even the countryside is not immune from war, and Kate must contend with more tragedy before she learns to find fulfillment, rather than mere consolation, in working to improve the peasants’ lives. Kate and her good deeds don’t shine as brightly as they should in this schematic take on the suffering of the innocents.
Pub Date: April 15, 1999
ISBN: 1-878448-87-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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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