Fresh, original, and carefully wrought: Parkinson’s tale generates a true sense of foreboding and dread without falling into...
From Irish children’s author Parkinson, a present-day gothic that takes us into a gloomy country house haunted by the memory of a dead child.
When young Niamh first arrives at the remote country estate of Platen, it seems to her one of the gloomiest yet most enchanting places she has ever seen. A newly certified hospital nurse, Niamh has been hired to care for Taggart, the dying master of the estate, by Taggart’s parvenu wife, Elise. Innocent and artless, Niamh enters Platen as one stepping into an alien world, and she notes all of the household eccentricities with the sharp eye of an outsider. Elise’s too-practiced devotion to her doomed husband stands out at first glance, as does Taggart’s weary stoicism. But lurking behind the careful order of the place are hints of some deep-buried sorrow. What were the true circumstances surrounding the death of Elise’s niece Miriam, who passed away nine years ago at Platen in an incident everyone refers to as “tragic” but refuses to discuss directly? Small-town folk can be very tight-lipped, but this is Ireland, after all, so Niamh manages to pick up details here and there from the local gossips—and from the archives of the local and foreign press, which turn out to have reported the “scandal” in fairly minute detail. It happens that Miriam’s death sets off a string of griefs in her family, and these troubles—which the author obviously sees as emblematic of Irish society in the 1980s—have cast a long shadow down to the present. For Niamh, who is just beginning to live as an adult woman in an adult world, Miriam’s troubles seem to hold the key to some of her own as well.
Fresh, original, and carefully wrought: Parkinson’s tale generates a true sense of foreboding and dread without falling into pathos or stepping into incoherence.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2004
ISBN: 0-85640-745-3
Page Count: 236
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
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