Darkly charming.
After two starkly different novels (The Hiding Place, 2001 and Remember Me, 2004), Azzopardi moves in yet a third direction: a romance, springing to life on the English coast, between two damaged souls struggling to get beyond tragic losses suffered in their childhoods.
For years, Lewis, now in his mid-30s, has been driving himself mad with survivor’s guilt over the death of his twin brother, Wayne, in a car accident when they were 15. He comes to the Norfolk coast looking for Carl, Wayne’s friend, who was driving the car but has never shown remorse. Lewis rents a room from Rita, a lively septuagenarian whose daughter Anna happens to be visiting to help Rita after a fall. Anna and Lewis immediately recognize and are drawn to each other’s despair, although their anguish differs in degree. Anna, lonely and neurotically withdrawn, suffering from partial hearing loss that dates back to her father’s death when she was seven, disapproves of Rita’s boisterous lifestyle and boyfriend, a retired actor/ventriloquist nicknamed Cabbage, but her scenes with her mother can be touchingly funny. Lewis has drawn closer to real insanity, with a scary tendency to black out and break things. Through coincidences that feel a bit too carefully staged, Lewis learns that Carl might be in nearby Winterton and takes off. Just as Lewis is dragging Carl into the ocean, possibly to drown him, Anna shows up. No one is hurt, but Rita tells Lewis he must go away until he gets his life on track. Meanwhile, Rita and Cabbage marry, much to the dismay of Anna. With help from Carl’s father, Lewis finally accepts the reality of his past and is ready to build a life with Anna, who has been facing down her own fears. Azzopardi keeps the lovers apart for too much of the novel. Their memories and even their interactions tend to be elliptical, but the novel’s odd logic nevertheless draws the reader in.
Darkly charming.Pub Date: March 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-8021-1841-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
