For his fourth time out, the earnest and best-selling Evans moves on from the families he’s written about previously (The Christmas Box, 1995; The Letter, 1997, etc.), offering a change of names but not of plot, place, or his own trademark cartoon melodrama. Michael Keddington, poor in material things but rich in his knowledge of right and wrong, dropped out of college to nurse his mother (alcoholic Dad is dead, gone, and not regretted) through a six-month decline due to cancer. Now she’s in her grave, Michael is left alone with many debts, and he goes to work on them by taking a job at the Arcadia nursing home, a job that pays little but is rich in other rewards’such as the friendship it brings him with one of its residents, the wise Esther Huish, who gradually reveals to Michael her long-held secret of a love she was afraid to accept when a young woman and was to regret losing ever after. Her advice is especially helpful to Michael in his own—hyper-platonic, seemingly—love with Faye Murrow. Faye is about to go east from Utah for medical school and very much wants a betrothal from Michael before she does. Two problems, though: her neurosurgeon father forbids it, despising the wrong-side-of-the-tracks Michael as far beneath his brilliant daughter; and Michael himself is fairly sure—but you—re wrong, Michael, wrong!—that he’s not good enough, either. Whether or not true love conquers all will depend not only on Bad Dad, Good Faye, and Good-yet- Uncertain Michael, but also on the influence of wise Esther Huish’s long-kept secret—and on the outcome of a nasty court trial whose ludicrous origins lie in purest villainy. The Evans faithful, though, will be gripped to the bittersweet end, unlikely, as usual, to be deterred or dismayed by their author’s remarkable bumblings with his high-school English: —. . . and my mind reeled in as many directions as the slush that spun from my tires.— The reader can only concur. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83473-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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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