A disappointment: McCabe's voice is a treasure, but it cannot turn water into beer.
A collection of vaguely linked stories, set in the fictional Irish town of Barntrosna and putatively authored by one Phildy Hackball - who is, in fact, none other than Irish novelist McCabe (Breakfast on Pluto, 1998, etc.).
The tremendous success of McCabe's dark novel The Butcher Boy, and the even greater success of Neil Jordan's bleakly riotous film of it, have suddenly brought McCabe a much larger audience abroad than he now enjoys at home (although his popularity has swelled there, too). Consequently, the market for his work has increased to such a degree that sales of just about anything with his name on it are pretty well assured. This may explain how these rather slight stories - which give every impression of being either fragments or sketches of larger works left stillborn - found their way into print, for there is nothing very memorable or striking in any of them, or in the collection as a whole. There is McCabe's distinctive voice, to be sure - simultaneously quaint and outrageous, capable of offending the very people it most entertains - and this is no small thing. The obsessed bishop of "I Ordained the Devil" (who comes to the conclusion, in the most macabre Jamesian style, that he did precisely that), the demented jealous husband of "Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge" (who's so convinced that his wife is unfaithful to him that he loses his reason in an Othellian fit of jealousy), and the epicene, pious prig of "the Bursted Priest" (who drives his young classmates so mad with his piety that they enact upon him a vengeance worthy of the Spanish Inquisition) - all of these (and quite a few others) are true McCabian types who lack the benefit of a real McCabian plot. Like bastard children, they have their father's eyes but lack his fortunes, and seem quite forlorn and homeless in the end.
A disappointment: McCabe's voice is a treasure, but it cannot turn water into beer.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019461-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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