Sentence by sentence, it's smooth, even vivid—but the grossly overextended whole adds up to good writing wasted on an...
There's a lot of abusive palaver and not much substance in this labored third novel from the punk-surrealist author of Cock and Bull (1993), Great Apes (1997), and other fetchingly deranged assaults on good taste, convention, and stuff like that.
One wants to admire an imagination that could conceive of this novel's afterlife—a rundown hinterland in which the dead hold jobs and intermingle more or less normally by the living-as experienced by its foul-mouthed narrator Lily Bloom (James Joyce is surely spinning peevishly in his grave), an American woman who dies of cancer in a London hospital. But Lily simply rattles on and on, about her two daughters, uptight Charlotte (who's infertile) and cokehead-whore Natasha ("Natty," who's anything but); her many marital and extra-curricular sexual frolics; the State of the World, as encapsulated in odd little throwaway observations ("Saddam invaded Kuwait and my girls indulged their own cravings"); and—most curiously—her relationship before and after death with fellow patient Phar Lap Jones, an affable aborigine (named after his country-creature, a famed racehorse) who covets Lily's false teeth, for which he bargains, promising to ferry her safely out of the land of the living. A few cheeky inventions amuse intermittently (sex is still available even after one has passed on, though Lily wryly notes that "live johns were numb to the dead hookers' insubstantiality"), but there simply isn't enough of a plot to justify even two hundred and fifty pages' worth of this jaded mockery. Nor is Lily much fun: she's a bundle of indignations, whose high-pitched rants accommodate far too many lame anti-Semitic gags (of course she's a Jew herself, so we're probably supposed to see the humor in her continual recourse to such conversational bytes as "D'jew know?" and "Mindjew").
Sentence by sentence, it's smooth, even vivid—but the grossly overextended whole adds up to good writing wasted on an underimagined and tiresome premise.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8021-1671-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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