Wastvedt’s flowing, long-winded tale, set in a Constable landscape in a parallel universe, is a deft but peculiar fusion of...
A melodramatic debut set in an idyllic English river valley.
For 30 years, the tragic drowning of the MacKinnon children, Catherine and Jack, in a boating accident in the 1950s, has haunted not only their subsequently estranged parents, Isabel and Robert, but also Josef Sevier, the friend who did not drown with them. Isobel, eaten up with fury and disbelief at her loss, has kept her mental instability in check under a carapace of steely efficiency. But when unmarried mother Anna settles in the blissful Devon village of Cameldip, Isabel becomes increasingly delusional and possessive of Anna’s new baby, Matthew. Threat and suspense are juxtaposed with lyrical romanticism as Wastvedt seesaws up and down the decades, introducing other village couples and interspersing layers of detail into the basic story. Josef’s parents, Adelie and Xavier, arrived dreamily, stepping off a train without their luggage, transplanted from Alsace to live a life of Gallic charm among the water meadows. The kind, widowed local doctor employed an attractive young housekeeper, Sarah, who comforted Robert after the tragedy and bore him a daughter, a secret she never divulged to him. Josef, grown into a withdrawn innkeeper who keeps shire horses in his art nouveau aviary, becomes involved with Anna as Christmas approaches. Then the story switches gears, dodging here and there among its many characters, piling on the effects and pulling out all the stops. Isabel, now completely convinced that Matthew is Jack, bashes Anna over the head and snatches the baby. A fire destroys Josef’s aviary—though not his horses. A flood surges down the river, threatening Isabel, who has taken Matthew on another of her deranged walks. Robert saves them both but dies himself. Nor is there a happy ending for brain-damaged Anna.
Wastvedt’s flowing, long-winded tale, set in a Constable landscape in a parallel universe, is a deft but peculiar fusion of gothic and rhapsodic.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-7007-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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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