As if deeply disappointed that America didn't right itself after seeing its doom in the comic forecasts of Love in the Ruins, Percy/Jeremiah returns with less funnystuff, fewer pages, zero fantasy, and much more resolve—none of which keeps Lancelot from being precious goods. "I will not tolerate this age," insists Lancelot Lamar, nuthoused after incinerating his Louisiana homestead while his unfaithful wife and her movie-star buddies slept within. A visitor has arrived—a priest, a psychiatrist, an old friend—and Lancelot explains himself in alternate bursts of confession and sermonizing. Pieces of the true-crime, true-love story pull irresistibly taut: discovering wife Margot's past adultery (a daughter's impossible blood type), logging her current dalliances (cameras rolling in every bedroom), shooing away the innocents and gathering the sinners together before pumping in the methane. If the preoccupation with fidelity seems dated Lancelot's lamentations over "the great whorehouse and fagdom of America" let us know that the anachronism is intended. With a vengeance. This "Knight of the Unholy Grail" seeks one real sin in a Manson world where murderers are sick, not bad, where women have stumbled on the crude reality of sex ("ah, sweet mystery of life indeed"), where Lancelot's teen-aged daughter triples up with bisexual film folk. Solution? "The future must be absolutely new"; Lancelot plans a log-cabin existence with the mute gang-rape victim in the next cell. Does this particular last gentleman speak for Percy? Probably not, since the priest who listens throughout is called Percival and is about to talk for the first time as the novel ends. But Lancelot's tirades will have readers pausing for breath and for thought, caught by surprise and kept from sleep by a great novelist working in the public interest. "Which is worse, to die with T. J. Jackson at Chancellorsville or live with Johnny Carson in Burbank?" You decide.
Pub Date: March 1, 1977
ISBN: 0312243073
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1977
BOOK REVIEW
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
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