Powerfully evocative, but wispy characterizations leave a void at the center.
A group of teachers cope with their desolate existence at a remote boarding school in Namibia.
Southwest Africa never had it easy. Colonized by the Germans and then the British, and later annexed by apartheid-era South Africa, the country endured a 20-year guerilla war before being reborn in 1989 as Namibia. And then there’s the cruel climate, with its killer droughts. Orner sets his first novel in Goas, a tiny settlement in the veldt. Once an unproductive farm, it passed to the Catholic church, which sent monks there to raise sheep. The sheep died; the monks disappeared into the empty veldt. Their ghosts, along with many others, haunt the school eventually erected there. In 1991, narrator Larry Kaplanski, a young American Jew from Ohio, joins the four other male teachers as a volunteer. Within weeks, there’s another arrival, Mavala Shikongo, the principal’s sister-in-law: beautiful, stern, tight-lipped Mavala, who was a soldier in the war. She soon disappears, but returns with a small boy, Tomo. Her fellow teachers are bewitched. The five men drink, reminisce and commiserate with each other. Orner’s novel is a montage of conversations, historical episodes and character sketches. Kaplanski’s neighbor in the singles quarters, Pohamba, visits the nearest town for female companionship. Head Teacher Obadiah, trapped in a loveless marriage, finds solace in drink and erudite commentaries. Kaplanski and Mavala start meeting for trysts at siesta time. Sometimes they’ll just talk; sometimes they’ll make love on the graves of the Voortrekkers (pioneer Boers). Both are enigmas: Kaplanski admits his “ineptitude” as a teacher, leading one to wonder why he’s there in the first place, and Mavala never reveals the identity of Tomo’s father. Is Kaplanski serious when he suggests they get married? Probably not. Any intentions evaporate in the heat as the cattle die. Mavala leaves again, abandoning her child; there had been unpleasantness with her sister and lecherous brother-in-law. In the endless drought, she becomes the memory of sweet rain.
Powerfully evocative, but wispy characterizations leave a void at the center.Pub Date: April 24, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-73580-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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