A diverting frolic through Pearson’s particular narrative homeland, filled with eccentrics and elaborate anecdotes that will...
Pearson’s ninth outing (after Blue Ridge, 2000) is a gangly ramble: a simple tale about a Virginia ne’er-do-well whose sudden capacity to tell the future makes him helpful in the case of a missing girl.
On such a threadbare plot Pearson spins and twines a lavish embroidery, sparkling with characters, tinted by anecdotes, and darkened by an overall hue of the good-humored fatalism endemic to Pearson’s work. Things begin as Clayton, a harmless deadbeat common to the author's small-town Virginia, suddenly abandons his days of watching the pornographic Satin Channel via a pilfered cable dish; instead, he sets about producing enigmatic charcoal drawings on the walls of his house and prophetic, albeit indistinct, mutterings no one can make much sense of. Enter Police Deputy Ray and his sassy-mouthed, part-time sidekick and former girlfriend Kit. The two begin paying attention to Clayton’s phrases and drawings. At the same time, a local woman’s daughter is abducted, and the amusingly absurd account of what she does with her life in the aftermath is one of the brightest story-notes in an otherwise routine set of events. (She becomes a TV anchorwoman and drinks amply from the well of counterfeit media celebrity—a subject the author takes more than one shot at.) As it turns out, Clayton is somehow “channeling” for a member of the British Polar Expedition of 1911. Among his utterances are the names of apples, and when Ray and Kit go to an orchard, they find the girl safe and healthy. Clayton himself simply disappears at the close, perhaps fittingly in a novel more notable for its fine style and language than for the architecture of its plot.
A diverting frolic through Pearson’s particular narrative homeland, filled with eccentrics and elaborate anecdotes that will entertain while the tale is, well, gotten on with.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03035-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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