Compelling, although nothing quite jells into clarity.
It’s difficult to separate the problems of the prisoners from those of their keepers in this unrelentingly dark multilayered prison drama from Moore (One Last Look, 2003, etc.), told from the point of view of three women and one man.
After six months on the psychiatric staff at a woman’s prison in upstate New York, Louise is still struggling to adjust to the bleak conditions. At first, readers may wonder along with Louise’s coworkers why a woman with her credentials chooses to practice there, but the lonely, divorced Louise, whose only joy is her young son Ransom, carries her own psychological baggage. She becomes increasingly involved in the case of Helen, a particularly troubled prisoner/patient. Helen hears voices she calls The Messengers, and clings to the belief that she was protecting her children when she killed them. A victim of abuse that began in childhood and continued beyond marriage and childbearing, Helen also believes, with good reason, that her younger sister, given up for adoption by Helen’s mother, is now a rising Hollywood starlet. Helen begins writing letters to Angie, a pill-popping actress who coincidently is romantically involved with Louise’s filmmaking ex-husband Rafael. Louise becomes sexually drawn to a young prison guard, Ike. Although Ike has his own narrative sections, he remains a cardboard cutout of male attractiveness. After walking in on Louise and Ike in bed, Ransom tells Rafael that Ike accosted him sexually. Outraged, the never-fleshed-out but alluring Rafael whisks Ransom off to California, where Angie cares for him in dangerously haphazard fashion. Distraught, Louise begins to fall apart emotionally. Meanwhile, Helen slips deeper into psychosis and ultimately commits suicide. Angie, who has come to believe she is Helen’s sister, gets Ransom to admit he lied and brings him home to Louise, who has been fired from the prison and now misses it terribly.
Compelling, although nothing quite jells into clarity.Pub Date: May 7, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-4190-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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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