Reid’s one-man campaign to resurrect the 18th- and 19th-century novel is a campaign well worth enlisting in. Don’t miss...
Reid departs from his popular Moosepath Chronicles (Daniel Plainway, 2000, etc.) with this first of a new series focusing on “the struggle between proprietors and settlers” in central Maine during the post–Revolutionary War years.
The former were Loyalists in possession of land granted to them by the English king; the latter, defiant homesteaders who called themselves “Liberty men” and raised a series of small wars against their wealthy oppressors. Into that volatile conflict steps the eponymous hero, a stalwart 17-year-old lad whose recently widowed mother has set him the task of finding his long-lost uncle (of whom Peter had never heard, and who is not his uncle, but the rival who had lost beautiful Rosemund Black to Peter’s father Silas Loon). Before a chastened Peter returns home, he’ll have shared an odyssey with traveling preacher and book peddler Zachariah Leach, enjoyed the hospitality of the ineffably Dickensian Clayden family (dead-ringers for the clan of David Copperfield’s Peggotty), helped rescue a runaway girl from the scoundrel bent on appropriating her, and, in a climactic march on the Wiscasset town jail, found himself buffeted between allegiances to both the Liberty men and their enemies and apprised of the truth of Parson Leach’s admonition that there is often truth on both sides of a quarrel. The story sputters a bit early on, and slows perilously as Reid concentrates numbingly on the Clayden brood’s heartiness and jollity. But it recovers nicely as urgent events grasp its characters’ attention (and ours). Peter is a splendid hero, and Zachariah Leach (a sage amalgam of Don Quixote and Fielding’s Parson Adams) whets the appetite for obviously forthcoming further adventures in a “chronicle” that thus far smoothly assimilates the influences of the aforementioned David Copperfield, Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, and miscellaneous dutifully acknowledged historical sources.
Reid’s one-man campaign to resurrect the 18th- and 19th-century novel is a campaign well worth enlisting in. Don’t miss Peter Loon.Pub Date: July 7, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03052-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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
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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