GlÅck pushes the envelope way too far as he attempts to use the history of a failed, would-be saint from the 15th century to explore his own romantic obsession in the 1990s. GlÅck (Jack the Modernist, not reviewed) admittedly embellishes the autobiography that Margery Kempe wrote during the 1430s to reveal the unhealthy psychology of this Jesus-crazed heretic. Margery is an upstanding woman, daughter of the mayor, wife of John, and mother of 14 children, who loses it when devils begin taunting her. But later, as she lies in the bed to which John has tied her because he's tired of her insane roaring, Jesus pays a visit, loosens her ropes, and inspires a passion that makes Margery swoon just looking at ``the semi-circles of his ass'' and the ``splayed tips of his long toes.'' Margery pretends to go on with her life, but all the while she's really waiting for Jesus in a heightened state of arousal. When he does show up ten years later, it's obvious there's going to be a whole lot of bumping and grinding going on. Unfortunately for Margery, Jesus is distant and cold (he absentmindedly counts his muscle twitchings during sex: `` `I spasmed eleven times,' he mused''), but this only makes Margery want him more. Classic victim mentality? Maybe. But GlÅck likes to think of it as Margery's modus operandi—she wants power, money, sex, prestige, and fame—and she needs Jesus to make the necessary connections to priests, vicars...even to God. If this isn't enough, the author sprinkles in his own unrequited-love story with a pretty little rich boy who refuses to make a commitment. Of course, GlÅck only gathers the strength to present his lover with a live-with-me-or-leave-me ultimatum when he sees how far Margery falls in her desire for the unattainable. Numbingly frenzied, frustrated, and futile.
Pub Date: Nov. 28, 1994
ISBN: 1-85242-334-X
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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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