A story, banking on sentiment and stereotype, that can’t convince.
A bland, heart-tugging saga about a newly separated Canadian filmmaker who flees to Ireland to document the emotional lives of a small town’s residents.
A fifth of the way through this tidy, methodical tale that slips back and forth in time, the reader grows alarmed to discover there isn’t going to be much more to the plot than this: mid-40s Liselle (“Lise”) has left her husband, Stephen, and college-age son back in Toronto to clear her head after a torrid affair in Mexico with an artist, Charlie, that has altered the course of her life. Second-novelist Stonich (These Granite Islands, 2001), a capable but unstylish writer, lends no new twist to this familiar situation but, instead, gives over most of her space to the nostalgic stories Lise extracts from the inhabitants of the Irish village where she’s rented a house. At Conner’s hardware store, she meets the rheumy patriarch owner, Remy, his sassy granddaughter, Siobhan, who is dying to join her boyfriend in Boston, except that she lacks the money, and Remy’s gorgeous wife, Margaret, who all, by fits and spurts, relate their personal stories on film. A few complications develop when Lise, during a drunken evening together, gives Siobhan the money to fly to Boston, and Margaret reveals some scandalous secrets about her own courtship with Remy. Meanwhile, the story of Lise’s affair with Charlie unfolds—a sordid and sad tale no matter how sympathetic the reader feels for Lise’s icy marriage. Charlie’s shaggy attractiveness and passionate license to display his nudes of her in a gallery in her hometown only irritate but don’t sway the reader, and a pat ending (leaving the character of husband Stephen utterly undeveloped) doesn’t work. Stonich piles on added emotional appeal in the form of Lise’s childhood memories of her own philandering father.
A story, banking on sentiment and stereotype, that can’t convince.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-81555-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
