An affectionate, sympathetic but also unstinting look at the woman inside the sovereign.
An imaginative glimpse into the queen of England’s psyche as she rebels against her routine.
Historian and biographer Kuhn’s first novel ought to find an avid readership among the filmgoers who flocked to The King’s Speech and The Queen. In fact, among the most delectable moments are when courtiers and queen reflect, with rue and occasional appreciation, upon the accuracy of such films. Sometime in the recent past, as British sentiment is swinging back from the anti-monarchism sparked by the Diana debacle, government economies are beginning to rankle the queen and feed into her increasing sense of malaise. It was bad enough when her yacht, Britannia, was decommissioned on the grounds that a constitutional monarch did not need a yacht. Now, they want to take away the private train that transports her to her Scottish retreat, Balmoral Castle. While walking alone in the Buckingham Palace gardens, the queen impulsively decides to visit Britannia where it’s moored, as a tourist attraction, near Edinburgh. At this point, storylines involving peripheral characters already introduced, at rather excessive length, by Kuhn, coalesce. Rebecca, a troubled young woman who works in the royal stables, and Rajiv, a young man of Indian heritage with poetic aspirations who’s employed by the royal cheese purveyor, help the queen aboard a public train to Edinburgh, where incognita in Rebecca’s hoodie, she chats up unsuspecting fellow passengers. Meanwhile, Luke, an equerry who is still reeling from his service in Iraq, and William, the queen’s butler, team up to locate the queen before MI5 and the tabloids do. A lady-in-waiting, Anne, and the queen’s loyal chief dresser, Shirley, are also on Her Majesty Elizabeth II’s trail. Kuhn does a convincing job of inhabiting the heads of his characters, crowned or not. Until an overworked denouement restores her remoteness, Kuhn’s queen is generous with surprising ruminations on her love for dogs, horses (but not deer!), Dubonnet and gin, and her subjects.
An affectionate, sympathetic but also unstinting look at the woman inside the sovereign.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-220828-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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