A surprisingly sweet and droll first-person account of the vexed attempts of an alien to understand the bafflingly unpredictable human race. The Pulitzer Prize—winning Butler (A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, 1993, etc.) has wandered far from his usual guilt-haunted terrain here, displaying a remarkably deft hand for gentle satire. A spaceman has been circling the earth for decades and—in an attempt to make sense of humans and their “complex and alien world”—gently abducting people, interviewing them, and returning them to their homes (after clearing their minds of any recollection of his presence). His mission: During the last minutes of 1999, he is to descend to the planet and inform its populace that they are not alone in the universe. But the project gets more and more unpredictably complicated. He’s fallen in love with Edna, a good-hearted beautician from Alabama whom he abducted from a WalMart parking lot. She’s named him Desi (his own name being unpronounceable), set up housekeeping aboard the spaceship, and doesn—t mind that he is short, thin, gray, and has eight fingers on each hand. Desi has abducted 12 people, on a bus trip to a casino, to have one last talk before his annunciation. Butler, not shy of controversy, has much fun with the religious overtones inevitably invoked. Some of the 12 insist, despite Desi’s denial, that he is a divine being. “We always knew there was someone bigger and better watching over us,” one says. “One era, it’s a carpenter. A whole other era, it’s a spaceman.” Desi goes down to earth as midnight nears, having chosen a suitably public place for his arrival. But he hasn’t counted on how accepting, even appreciative, humans can be of that which is odd and unsettling. His mission, he discovers, is really only beginning. Light, mischievous, satisfying entertainment. (First printing of 50,000; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8021-1660-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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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