A terrific novel. Winton’s best yet.
Australian Winton’s seventh novel, seven years in the making, is an exhilarating multilayered amalgam of withering satire and beguiling character creation—a more than worthy successor to his critically acclaimed Cloudstreet (1992) and The Riders (1995).
The setting is fictional White Point, a fishing village on the western coast of Australia where a recent lobster boom has created a number of raffish, hard-drinking nouveaux riches. One of the more respectable of them is widower Jim Buckridge, who lives in something very like splendor with his two teenaged sons and his 40-year-old mistress Georgie Jutland, a former nurse, and a fugitive of sorts, from her own wealthy (and troubled) family. Winton has a fine time skewering the “White Pointers’” pretensions, while patiently revealing the present and past influences that shape stoical Jim and restless Georgie—whose relationship is thrown into more confusing relief when Georgie plays Catherine to the Heathcliff of itinerant fish-poacher and failed band musician Luther Fox, who completes the trifecta of major characters. All three have suffered traumatic loss or violence, or both (in Luther’s case, it’s a comic-horrible history of family maimings and deaths that’s positively Dickensian). All three make heroic and farcical efforts to shed the shackles of the past and reinvent themselves. Winton presents this uniquely textured fable of growth and change as a boisterous comedy, whose principals are surrounded by a garrulous Australian chorus of vivid supporting characters (“Beaver,” the shady video-store owner with a newly purchased Vietnamese wife, may be the best of a marvelously scurvy lot). All this against a rich backdrop whose landscape and climate are evoked with muscular imagistic precision (as a cyclone approaches, “Lightning bleaches the trees and a waterspout rises like an angry white root from the dirt-coloured sea”).
A terrific novel. Winton’s best yet.Pub Date: May 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2802-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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