From noted Indonesian dissident Toer (Child of All Nations, 1993, etc.), the third novel in an ambitious but flawed quartet continues the story of Javanese patriot Minke, who now takes up the anticolonial fight in earnest. Like Toer's previous books, Footsteps was first composed orally while the author was a political prisoner; he remains under house arrest in Jakarta, and his books are banned in Indonesia. Also like its predecessors, unfortunately, it is a clumsy mix of earnest political reportage and often lyrical personal detail. Minke, the series' protagonist, who has dabbled in journalism while wanting to become a doctor, is finally accepted at the medical school for ``natives'' in Batavia. There he is expected to wear indigenous, not European, dress: The Dutch colonial powers in the early 1900s are as ethnically doctrinaire as their Afrikaner cousins in South Africa. Minke soon realizes he is not cut out to be a doctor—especially a native one, who must work for the colonial rulers at a fixed low rate. Still drawn to politics, he meets beautiful Mei, who is working to establish Chinese self-help organizations in the Indies and urges him to do something substantive for his people as well as become a doctor. They marry, and when Mei dies after a severe bout of malaria, Minke forms an embryonic nationalist organization. But his grades are poor, and he is expelled from medical school. Next he founds a magazine and, when it succeeds, a newspaper, the first to be owned and operated by natives. Along the way he acquires powerful enemies, who force him to leave both Java and his new wife, the warrior Princess, who killed one of Minke's enemies with her own pistol. But the struggle will continue. As usual, vivid vignettes of colonial folly, local characters, and customs at the turn of the century, but the political agenda continues to be obtrusive.
Pub Date: Feb. 22, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-13748-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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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