Reading Harold Fry first will allow this deeply emotional novel to resonate more fully.
Joyce (Perfect, 2014, etc.) offers an introspective follow-up to her 2012 breakout debut, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.
Queenie Hennessy has entered St. Bernadine’s Hospice in northeast England. Cancer has destroyed her throat and jaw, and now she awaits death among "rejects, you might say...and it was a relief, a blessed relief." Word comes that a friend, Harold Fry, has learned of her illness. He intends to walk from Kingsbridge, 600 miles away. Harold wants Queenie to wait for him. What follows is a history of their fractured friendship, with her confession as the narrative’s heart. Decades prior, when the two worked together, Queenie fell in love with Harold but never revealed her feelings. "I loved your voice, your walk, your marriage, your hands, your zigzag socks...for God’s sake, everything about you." Harold had a brilliant son, David, a troubled young man—"For all his selfishness, he was as astute as a knife"—whom Queenie attempted to help. "I had promised myself that I would be a bridge between you and your son, and I was out of my depth." David committed suicide. In Queenie’s meditative memories—"There is a huge story ahead of me, and the truth is so complicated"—her remembrance of unrequited love is shared with a sometimes-funny, sometimes-sad reflection on life’s bitter end. Any pathos is mostly subsumed by wry humor and clarity regarding life’s foibles, the story ending with a beautiful twist reminding us we all journey through life as lonely, sometimes-inarticulate pilgrims.
Reading Harold Fry first will allow this deeply emotional novel to resonate more fully.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9667-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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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