A different sort of storyteller, English novelist Binding shifts from the macabre world of hangings in A Perfect Execution (1996) to the furtive hazards of collaboration among Britain’s Guernsey Islanders under Nazi occupation. For them, the horrors of war are muted, allowing an intensely personal tale of romance, duty, and murder to emerge. Life on Guernsey is certainly different after the Germans arrive, but for all the added gun emplacements, gangs of gaunt foreign laborers, short food rations, and jackbooted troops, it’s still possible for two men to be in love with the same woman. Ned Luscombe loved Isobel first, before the war, and she reciprocated even though the chasm of class yawned wide between them. By the time the highly cultured, sensitive Major Lentsch arrives to command the occupation force, however, the ardor between Ned and Isobel has cooled, and as the new head of the island police force Ned can only look on as she takes up with his boss. But then Isobel is murdered, and the two rivals are required to join forces in a painful investigation. Along the way, they become unlikely yet fast friends, though ongoing events keep them from making much headway: Isobel’s father, the architect of the island’s metamorphosis into a fortress, disappears; a thriving black market involving soldiers and civilians comes to light; Ned’s lover before Isobel, Veronica, having already become the daylight mistress of the island’s Gestapo chief, secretly harbors one of the starving laborers—a boy with the only direct knowledge about who killed Isobel. Churning just below all this, in the witches’ brew that Guernsey has become, is the resentment of loyal British citizens who—ve been too long repressed, and a plot that will mean death for every islander should it be carried out. Credible and extraordinarily revealing: all that we are as humans, good and bad, finds embodiment on this tiny island in the midst of war.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7867-0657-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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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