Only a Brit could have produced this solipsistically witsome reflection of contemporary life—and nobody does it better.
British novelist Hannah debuts here with a biting, severely realistic George Elliotesque take on a group of late-20s professionals centered in Cambridge and Yorkshire who totter precipitously on the verge of breakup and calamity.
Sim Purdy, story editor for the popular TV soap drama Potters Court, is the galvanizing center of her group of far-flung friends, who tolerate each other only because of unfathomable English school affiliations and Sim's insistence on “tribal belonging.” She lives in Yorkshire with grumpy, combative Francis, who writes for the BBC; the big wedding of their idyllically suited friends Lucy and Matt, now living in Washington, D.C., is only weeks away, but another branch of the tree, Campbell and Eve in Manchester, has mysteriously and subversively split. Sim, the consummate macher more interested in meddling in other people's affairs than in facing her own (which include coming clean about a fling with unsavory Andrew Johnson), deems it her duty to bring Campbell to his senses by ridiculing his dopey new love, heiress to the Napper tobacco fortune. Meanwhile, a Cambridge couple, ferocious-tempered, profane literary editor Vanessa and her politically minded Modern Languages lover Nicholas, begin to chill after Vanessa drives into a Chinese cyclist and sees how sadistic she can play; while Nicholas finds himself blackmailed by Gillian, one of the group's former floozy friends turned pariah. It would be nearly impossible to engage the reader's attention in a dozen characters, and not half of them sympathetic, except that Hannah via Sim cares so deeply about the nuances of intention, action, and consequence that the reader is dragged, albeit reluctantly, through reams and reams of spiraling gossip. Who cares? some of the (male) characters continually mouth, but Hannah's meticulous and thorough process is actually fascinating for its own sake.
Only a Brit could have produced this solipsistically witsome reflection of contemporary life—and nobody does it better. (Author tour)Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56947-281-5
Page Count: 439
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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