A clever but seriously self-indulgent drug fantasy.
A 30-something vagabond with a closetful of addictions experiments with a macabre new career.
Bishop-Stall, better known for experiential journalism in his native Canada, unleashes a profane, anarchic host of dope fiends in his first novel. Loosely framed against the lyrical structure of Bob Seger’s song “Fire Lake,” the story is a cautionary tale about a writer whose desire to get high derails his ability to tell good stories. Mason Dubisee is a mess when we meet him, and never gets much clearer. He’s landed in Toronto with Chaz, a coolly manipulative dealer who goes to such great lengths to please his customers that he builds his own private club complete with a drug bar and a panic room. “Mason had vowed that he’d never become a dealer, but he’d broken a lot of other vows—that’s what happened if you went around vowing haphazardly like a carefree, careless monk,” writes Bishop-Stall. Instead of pulling him into the family business, Chaz sets Mason up with a gig as “The Dogfather,” a dealer of dirty-water hot dogs to the city’s worker bees. When a regular, Warren, finds out about Mason’s writing abilities, he hires him to write his suicide note. This “successful” exchange sets Mason up in business, writing goodbye letters for some equally forgettable characters. The seedy characters with which the author surrounds Mason, notably a heroin-addicted paraplegic named Willy, lead to some interesting vignettes. However, the novel is also chaotic, rocketing from drug parlor to rooftop to hungover mornings, mimicking the blackout-riddled arc of its main character. Its nine disparate sequences often play out like short stories whose narrative connections are torn and frayed. By the time Mason is pitted against “The Handyman,” a psychotic Finnish serial killer in a winner-takes-all game of cards, it’s not easy to keep rooting for him.
A clever but seriously self-indulgent drug fantasy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59376-295-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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