Burnham, who makes no secret of siding with the Cathars, mixes romance with religious history in an evocative prose that...
Historical about a heretical sect of Catholics in 13th-century France, a tale imbued with Burnham’s trademark enthusiasm for religious spiritualism (The President’s Angel, 1993, etc.).
Jeanne, a haggard, half-mad old woman in her 40s (old for the 13th century) wanders the countryside, hiding from Dominican inquisitors, remembering bits of her past. When she meets a simple farmer, Jerome, he takes her in, and she shares her history as they make tentative steps toward a life together. Raised by the Cathars after being orphaned in the 1209 massacre of Beziérs in the Languedoc region, Jeanne was brought up by Lady Esclarmonde, a real historical figure, within the Cathar faith that mixed strands of mysticism, asceticism and populism. At 13, after an act of mean-spiritedness, Jeanne was sent to the saintly Bishop of Montségur for instruction, and at Montségur, she met William, a former English crusader. They fell in love, but Jeanne was forced into an arranged marriage while William wound up wed to Baiona, Jeanne’s long-suffering best friend. Five years later, after Jeanne divorced her husband for sleeping with his sister, she encountered William again. This time, they began a long-term affair that ended only when she became pregnant and William arranged for her to marry another out of convenience. Meanwhile, the Cathar way of life was being threatened by a combination of Catholic intolerance and French nationalism. At the siege of Montségur, where the Cathars were destroyed, Jeanne found herself united with William and Baiona, her two great loves, both later burned as heretics while she gave up martyrdom to help hide the Cathar treasure. Now, just as she is about to set off to find the treasure and begin a life with Jerome (who half believes her stories), Jeanne is denounced to the inquisitors.
Burnham, who makes no secret of siding with the Cathars, mixes romance with religious history in an evocative prose that should thrill the spiritually intrigued.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-000079-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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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