Reading the book is like flipping through 500 channels without stopping—lots of color and glimpses of interesting moments,...
Three continents, 60 years and what feels like countless characters define this dense novel about politics, science and morals.
If that seems like too much, you’re right, it is. Ings, a British science journalist and science-fiction writer, bounces madly from the London blitz to the moon landing to our celebrity-soaked present day, but he never stays in one place long enough to make a reader feel caught up in the swim of history. And the characters just keep coming: There’s Saul Cogan, an employee at a London philosophical society who gets drawn into a circle of revolutionaries in Mozambique; Stacey Chavez, a B-list actress whose stepfather is a business partner of Nick Jinks, who deals in human trafficking; Anthony Burden, a supposedly brilliant mathematician who’s prone to emotional breakdowns and stuck in a failed marriage while living on an Israeli kibbutz; and, somewhat inexplicably, Jim Lovell, the commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, who runs a tony restaurant outside Chicago. Ings tries to connect the disparate timelines and characters, but unlike similarly ambitious novels like Don DeLillo’s Underworld or David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, this one never coheres into the illuminating vision of geopolitical chaos that the author intended to create. But though the book’s pleasures are only intermittent, they do exist: Ings is a graceful writer, and he’s on firm footing in the sections about Cogan’s involvement in London’s late-’60s revolutionary foment, and his descriptions of urban pranksters, squatters and activists of both the peace-and-love and violent varieties are informed and engaging. Indeed, it’s obvious that Ings would have been much better served choosing a particular moment and spending time with it, instead of taking this ocean-wide, foot-deep approach.
Reading the book is like flipping through 500 channels without stopping—lots of color and glimpses of interesting moments, but little coheres.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-8021-7030-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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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