After the author’s fine debut, Cereus Blooms at Night (1998), this is a disappointment.
Love crosses social boundaries and survives years of separation, in Canadian author Mootoo’s lush, sensuous second novel.
The contrasted settings are Vancouver’s Elderberry Bay and the fictional island of Guanagaspar, an “unprotected archipelago strewn to one side of the Caribbean Sea.” It begins in “the present day,” with emigrant Vancouver landscape gardener Harry St. George’s dream of his homeland (and of a destructive tidal wave) juxtaposed with the memories of an imperious government official’s wife initially identified only as “Madam”—whose relationship to Harry becomes clear when an emergency phone call from Madam’s daughter recalls him to Guanagaspar. The story’s long central section relates the brief marriage of Harry’s (Hindu) Indian mother Dolly to the fisherman Seudath (drowned when his boat is lost at sea), and the innocent friendship that develops, throughout the 1940s, between young Harry and Rose Sangha, the privileged daughter of the kindly matron who employs Dolly as her housemaid and accepts her as a friend. But wartime tensions and the haughty domestic tyranny of Sangha père “exile” Harry from Rose’s company, even when they later attend the same school, and after Rose weds the island’s future attorney general—finally sending Harry to his new life in Canada. The reader infers these identities and relationships only gradually, thanks to an inexplicably convoluted structure that emphasizes the singularity of Mootoo’s characters without clearly presenting them. All is explained eventually by the climax, in which Harry’s hopeful return to Guanagaspar is met by the news announced in Mootoo’s title, a flurry of new information blended with more flashbacks and a curious, dramatically unsatisfying resolution. Mootoo’s second aims to be a Caribbean Wuthering Heights, but its perplexing obscurity removes it as far from Emily Brontë’s Yorkshire as from her novel’s shapely clarity.
After the author’s fine debut, Cereus Blooms at Night (1998), this is a disappointment.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1798-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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