The factual information Gruen presents about bonobos and their language acquisition is compelling; unfortunately, the...
In this novel about a researcher’s devotion to a family of bonobo apes, the author of Water for Elephants (2006) turns her attention to another mistreated mammal whose intellectual capacity has been undervalued by humans.
Aspergerish Isabel Duncan has found joy studying the advanced language development of bonobo apes that have been raised to communicate in English and sign language. At the research lab where she works, the bonobos—matriarch Bonzi, outgoing Sam, adolescent Jelani, pregnant Makena, sensitive male Mbongo and baby Lola—are treated with respect and love, but animal-rights activists constantly protest the facility. Shortly after Philadelphia Inquirer reporter John Thigpen interviews Isabel, watches her play with the bonobos as an equal and experiences one-on-one communication with Bonzi, the Language Lab is bombed by masked intruders, and the Earth Liberation League, an animal-rights extremist group, claims responsibility. Isabel is seriously wounded. The apes are not physically hurt, but the university funding Isabel’s research quickly sells them to a secret buyer to avoid further problems. Isabel’s fiancé and boss Dr. Peter Benton’s nonchalance horrifies her, and she throws him out even before she finds out he’s slept with her assistant. (Gruen conveys to the reader loud and clear early on that Benton is a baddy.) The apes have ended up in New Mexico starring in a hit reality show produced by a porno magnate that emphasizes their sex lives over their language skills. Isabel vows to save the bonobos even if it means working with former enemies. Meanwhile John is fired from the Inquirer and moves to Los Angeles when his wife, a discouraged novelist, gets a TV job. When a sleazy tabloid hires John to check out the reality show in New Mexico, he and Isabel work separately and together to save the bonobos.
The factual information Gruen presents about bonobos and their language acquisition is compelling; unfortunately, the humans, who get far more page space, are a drag.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-52321-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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