A mingling of financial high jinks and social satire by one of the most restlessly inventive of contemporary British novelists. Boyd (The Blue Afternoon, 1995, etc.) has found an almost perfect metaphor for the uncertain nature of identity in the Western world in the life of an insurance claims adjuster. Polished, bright, self-assured Lorimer Black spends his work life in London prying into the events surrounding calamitous insurance claims. Frequently he discovers conspiracies: a company claiming that inventory has been stolen when in fact it has been sold on the black market to raise cash for a failing concern, or a hopelessly-in-debt firm using a fire to bail itself out. Suave Lorimer, traveling with an attachÇ case full of cash, gently reveals his discoveries, gets the (most often hopelessly amateurish) conspirators to admit their actions—and settles the claim for far less than its face value. He’s a rising star in his business, but one relentlessly shadowed by duplicities of his own: his real name is Milomre Blocj, he’s the descendant of gypsies driven from Eastern Europe, and he’s pursuing a hopeless infatuation with a wary model, married to a violently possessive husband. The levels of falsehoods in his life (he’s even invented an appropriately old-school-tie past) have driven him to insomnia—and to the wonderfully named Institute of Lucid Dreams for a cure. Matters come to a head when Lorimer/Milo keeps probing into the curious events surrounding the torching of a luxury hotel under construction. His investigations, handled with vigorous detail by Boyd, eventually reveal a large (and believable) conspiracy set in motion by Dirk Van Meer, a gnomish, jolly, lethal powerbroker. Along the way, Boyd nicely skewers a variety of hustlers, from upper-class twits to the oily Van Meer to Lorimer’s zestfully thuggish boss, Hogg. His portrait of the hopelessly divided Milo/Lorimer is unsparingly sharp and droll. And his depiction of the manner in which Milo eventually reinvents himself, and defies the cabal, seems both right and moving. A harsh, witty, resonant novel, and an impressive work.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-40223-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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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