like Ana’s, and Anne’s, can have no end.
A novel-within-a-novel whose author chooses a Sarajevo woman glimpsed on a TV newsreel as a way of exorcising her
own long-suppressed demons. “Why Bosnia?” Anne Raynard’s friends all ask about the setting of her new novel. After all, she’s never even visited the place, and her harrowing account of Bosnia’s descent from civilization to savagery has to compete with dozens of equally harrowing novels and factual accounts. These well-meaning friends and critics, some of whom voice uncomfortably apt reservations, don’t know that Anne is using Ana Gusic, her alter ego, to project her own grief and rage—about her husband’s hellish memories of Vietnam, her father’s Alzheimer’s, her own brush with murderous violence a generation ago, and her need, despite her bookish Cambridge lifestyle, to give voice to her enduring feelings of guilt, revulsion, and terror. In drawing such insistent parallels between an American writer sheltered by wealth and safety and a Sarajevo Muslim poet watching her country torn asunder, first-novelist Ireland risks charges of presumption, inflation, and self-absorption; after all, what in Anne’s life can possibly equip her to enter into Ana’s nightmare? But Ireland proves remarkably agile and sensitive in disarming these criticisms by focusing for so long on the telltale social amenities slipping away one by one—the lack of pressed clothing, the loss of trees to fuel for freezing neighbors, the paintings of sun and moon that replace the glass in Ana’s shuttered windows, the fruitless search for insulin for her diabetic son, the bickering over the water supplies of the latest casualties—that by the time she gets to the newsreel horrors, they seem chillingly logical next steps in the degradation of Ana and her homeland. Even Ireland’s division of her unsettling evocation into a brief “beginning” and a long “middle” acknowledges that stories
like Ana’s, and Anne’s, can have no end.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-55597-300-0
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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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