Faulks remains at the peak of his considerable strength.
Faulks’s latest may lack the breadth of Birdsong (1996) or Charlotte Gray (1999), his usual deep sensibilities and conjurer’s gift for evoking time and place are what matter.
The political and psychic scars of WWI remain everywhere in France in the 1930s, even in the drab provincial city of Janvilliers – to which, one rainy night, young Anne Louvet makes her way by train to take up her new post as waitress at the shabby hotel called the Lion d’Or. From the start, there’s a mystery about Anne (Louvet isn’t even her real name), but there are also the allures of her quick intelligence, ready sense of humor – and her appealingly attractive good looks. So it is that the crass André Mattlin, architect and roué, sets his sights on her, while Anne’s own wiser and deeper heart goes out to one Charles Hartmann, who – with his barren and unhappy wife Christine – lives in the ancient mansion outside of town that he’s inherited from his father and hopes to repair. Anne’s interest in Charles is returned, and when Charles tells his wife he’s needed in Paris on business (he’s a lawyer), he in fact takes Anne on a weekend to the comfortably splendid country house of an old friend. From there on, once love is declared, the tale moves toward an ending that will break the hearts of some, strike fear into others. When Anne finally tells Charles her extraordinary, pathetic mystery, not a great deal by way of plot is released, but the novel’s truest assets are brought to vivid life indeed. The atmosphere of between-the-wars anxiety tips toward a new foreboding, making Charles’s being partly Jewish (the vile, devilish Mattlin uses this against him); various awful memories of WWI; the weakness of France’s governments; and the true horror of Anne’s girlhood secret all blend into a story of quiet and terrible power.
Faulks remains at the peak of his considerable strength.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-70453-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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