Displaying a sure command of character as well as a poetic mastery of language, Hall is a talent to be reckoned with.
Artists and the art world dominate this novel of love and landscape.
Hall (Daughters of the North, 2008, etc.) deftly balances multiple narratives across a generation and a geographical area bridging England and Italy. Signor Giorgio, a reclusive Italian painter, dies in the early 1960s, his last years dominated by still lifes of bottles. After his death, Annette Tambroni, a blind girl overly protected by her mother, begins to tend his grave. More than 30 years later, Peter Caldicutt, a talented English painter, finds himself pinned down by boulders at the bottom of a gorge in Cumbria. When younger, Peter had written to Giorgio to express admiration for his work and to pose some questions that caused Giorgio to reflect on his preoccupation with the seeming anachronism of the still life. Now, trapped and desperate, Peter reviews his life while waiting for rescue. Two of the objects of his reminiscence are his twin children. Danny has recently been killed in a motorbike accident; Susan, who had served almost as a mirror of her brother’s moods and emotions, takes his death particularly hard and deals with it largely through erotic escape. She neglects her long-term relationship with Nathan and begins a scorching affair with Tom, her fellow curator on an art exhibit in London. Peter also recalls his early days as an art student in the ’60s, his marriage to the freewheeling Raymie and the threesome they formed with Peter’s even more freewheeling artistic mentor, Ivan Dyas. Although Annette makes appearances throughout this many-voiced novel, the primary figures are domineering Peter, in his daughter’s eyes a “colossal man…who smoked dope and rock-climbed with the Earl’s sons, who walked around either stark bollock-naked or dressed for the theatre,” and sensitive, anguished Susan, trying desperately to find herself after the loss of her alter ego.
Displaying a sure command of character as well as a poetic mastery of language, Hall is a talent to be reckoned with.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-143045-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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