A finely crafted consideration of responsibility within a familiar historical tale.
A judge who presided at the Salem witch trials comes to repent of his role.
Although leavened with wit, British novelist and historian Francis’ fictionalization of Samuel Sewall’s predicament is a cerebral, scrupulous, often abstract story. Thirty-eight-year-old Sewall—not only a judge, but “a Council member, merchant, private banker, householder and family man”—is a soul striving for decency in a challenging era. The Puritan community in Boston in the late 17th century, bounded by ocean on one side and wilderness on the other, faced many threats, including the distant but powerful control of the British king, the French, the Indians, attacks, and massacres. As the novel opens, Sewall’s involvement in the trial of seven pirates leads him to regret that he may have compromised his principles and shown weakness. And then reports begin of witchcraft and spectral visitations in Salem. Francis, who previously wrote a respected biography of Sewall (Judge Sewall’s Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of the American Conscience, 2005, etc.), seems magnetized by the perpetual dilemmas of morality, grace, and faith as embodied in an honest man, hampered by “fear of authority, or at least the desire to placate those in power,” now confronted by a rapidly spreading contagion of either devilry or lying children. As the trials begin and then the hangings, and the spate of accusations gathers pace, the community begins to grow uneasy and ultimately hostile to the judges and their methods. Meanwhile, Sewall continues his relentless self-questioning. Francis’ measured narration allows the suffering, piety, and tragic delusions of events to emerge with clarity. Sewall is both perpetrator and witness and, eventually—through his expressions of atonement—a voice of conscience.
A finely crafted consideration of responsibility within a familiar historical tale.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60945-351-0
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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
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