For once this major American writer appears, uncharacteristically, to have veered off course.
For his sixth novel, Rash (The Cove, 2012, etc.) plays a park ranger’s past traumas against a sheriff’s present crises.
When Becky Shytle was in elementary school in Virginia, a gunman invaded her school, killing the teacher who had escorted her to safety. For months afterward she couldn’t speak, finding her voice only in the safe haven of her grandparents’ farm. Later, as a park ranger, a relationship ended badly when her boyfriend became an eco-terrorist and was killed. That time, it was the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins who saved her soul, along with the anonymous cave painters of Lascaux. In an unnamed town in the North Carolina mountains, Rash’s invariable setting, Becky, now the superintendent of a state park, has found a kindred spirit in the sheriff, Les. He too turned inward after his wife’s suicide attempt led to an exceptionally painful divorce. Les is 51, retiring after 30 years’ hard grind; just two more items of business left. The first is a meth bust, so nightmarish a rookie officer quits on the spot. (Rash on meth-heads is always riveting.) The second involves the poisoning of trout at a fishing resort. The prime suspect is elderly landowner Gerald Blackwelder, a good man but ornery and Becky’s staunch supporter in all things environmental. She alternates as narrator with Les; her Hopkins-infused musings are a counterpoint to Les’ action-oriented segments. There are six players in the poisoning case, so Les has his work cut out for him, and this storyline takes over the novel. An ordinary whodunit seems to have elbowed aside a more spacious novel about characters whose deep affinities with the natural world, and its interpreters, sustain them among unremitting man-made violence.
For once this major American writer appears, uncharacteristically, to have veered off course.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-234931-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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