Spare, resonant, unputdownable.
A gripping environmental drama pits the rescue of a drowned child against the integrity of a river.
Narrator Maggie Glenn works for a newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina. The 28-year-old photographer was born and raised in Tamassee, in the mountains to the west, and she’s assigned, along with star reporter Allen Hemphill, to cover a big story in her hometown. Three weeks earlier, 12-year-old Ruth Kowalsky had been sucked into a whirlpool in the Tamassee River; county divers have failed to dislodge her body from the rock where it lies trapped. Ruth’s father Herb, a powerful banker from Minnesota, wants to make the divers’ job easier by erecting a portable dam to divert the water flow. One problem: Erection means drilling holes into the bedrock, and federal law protects the river from any violation of its natural state. Storywriter and second-novelist Rash (One Foot in Eden, not reviewed) sets up a finely balanced confrontation between Luke Miller, fearless and incorruptible champion of the river (though no saint), and Ruth’s grieving parents, who want to give her a proper burial. Uncomfortably in the middle is the district ranger. Back in Tamassee, Maggie has more on her mind than her job. She has been estranged from her father ever since her brother Ben and she were badly burned in a childhood accident for which the old man was responsible. Now he’s dying of cancer. Can Maggie make peace with him, as her more forgiving brother did years ago? On the job, she takes a haunting photograph of the despondent Herb Kowalsky. Along with Hemphill’s reporting, it helps tip the balance in favor of the temporary dam. Luke, her ex-lover and mentor, is furious, and Maggie herself, secretly on his side, regrets taking it. But the suspense isn’t over. The river is rising. Will the dam hold long enough for the divers to retrieve the girl?
Spare, resonant, unputdownable.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7487-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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