A poor start, frankly: two-dimensional characters, wooden dialogue, and a painfully transparent ending provide few...
A rather stiff debut novel about a grief-stricken old man’s descent into madness and violence.
Dutch Potter is a tough old coot. A small-town boy from upstate New York, Dutch grew up in a stern Lutheran family and saw plenty of action in France and Germany as an infantryman during WWII. Later on, he settled down with his wife Sarah, took a job as a bus driver, and raised a family. His life would have been moderately happy and entirely unremarkable were it not for the Vietnam War, but Dutch’s son Jom joined the Marines in the late 1960s and was sent over on a tour of duty from which he never returned. Reported as missing in action, Jom became an angry, hungry ghost tormenting Dutch, who never for a minute could accept the possibility that his son might be dead. For 12 years Dutch pursued his hopeless quest, firing off increasingly wild and angry letters to government officials in the US and abroad, until one day, in 1982, he decided that he had to resort to more desperate measures. He showed up for work dressed in his old army uniform, drove his bus off the road, and took all the passengers hostage, demanding an answer to what he knew to be an official cover-up of his son’s true whereabouts. Holding a few dozen assorted strangers at bay with an old hand grenade is no great feat, but will it do any good? It may well, for soon enough Dutch is negotiating with a retired Marine Corps colonel who claims that Jom has just been released from a Hanoi prison and is in a naval hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. Can he be trusted? Or is it all too good to be true? Any old soldier knows that luck is not a reliable ally, but sometimes it can help to carry the day. Is Dutch lucky, then, or crazy?
A poor start, frankly: two-dimensional characters, wooden dialogue, and a painfully transparent ending provide few variations on the standard MIA storyPub Date: Oct. 22, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-42204-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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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