The author’s weakest work to date, a waste of his considerable talent.
Disappointing ninth novel from McCabe (Winterwood, 2007, etc.), the self-portrait of an Irishman undone by childhood trauma.
Chris McCool was conceived in a barn on the Thornton estate, where his mother, the Protestant Lady Thornton, was seduced by a Catholic accountant. Aristocratic Henry Thornton reacted with fury to his wife’s contamination and informed her that the baby boy must never be brought into the manor. Chris was set up in a rustic cottage and raised by a Catholic zealot, Dimpie McCool; his genteel mother and equally genteel friend Ethel visited him at night. By the time Chris was a teenager, Dimpie and both Thorntons were dead, leaving him with a bunch of chickens and lasting psychic scars. Even though Chris is over 60 when he introduces himself to readers in the opening pages, his focus is on his 24-year-old self, a successful dairy farmer living in the small town of Cullymore. It’s 1969, and Chris just loves the ’60s: the clothes, the hipness, above all the music. Yet something is terribly wrong. Why would Chris visit his mother’s old friend Ethel, climb onto her lap, precipitate her heart attack and leave her unattended? Why would he fantasize that his mother had a perfect little son ensconced in the manor? And why, most startlingly, would his obsession with a pious Nigerian high-school student lead him to scrawl racist slurs in the cathedral? His shenanigans lead him to a Hindu shrink and eventually to solitary confinement in a mental hospital. None of this makes much sense, and Chris’s glib, jokey tone doesn’t help: It’s a little off, unconvincing. The furious energy that drove much of McCabe’s previous work is missing; instead we have a dismaying flatness as Chris makes the rounds of his obsessions: the religious divide, blackness, a cherished poetry anthology. It’s a hermetically sealed world, and McCabe has not created credible characters to penetrate it.
The author’s weakest work to date, a waste of his considerable talent.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59691-611-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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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