Dark stories that are better at evoking than illuminating.
Nine stories explore the dark years of the late ’80s in Sierra Leone (where the author was a Peace Corps volunteer), when corruption flourished, the government broke down, and the country imploded.
Novelist McCauley (The Tuning Over, 1998) is an accomplished scene-setter as well as chronicler of the dispiriting relations between white expats and the local Africans struggling to survive the increasing lawlessness. The heat is palpable here (“the prickly heat was burning across my back”), the squalor visible (“a small yard filled with broken hardware, motorcycle frames, rusting bed springs”), and the people desperate (“Fouday’s wounds had been caused by his grandmother. She’d tied him, hands and feet, to keep him from running off to find his father”). McCauley’s protagonists evoke generic white men in Africa, disillusioned and cynical because their efforts to do good are thwarted by locals who bribe and steal to survive. In “Palaver,” Hunter is threatened with prison unless he pays a bribe to the police when he reports a crime, and in “The Turning Over,” project manager and pot-smoking Kelley realizes that all his work with local fisherman will be undone when he’s replaced by a corrupt local official. An edgy and insecure American aid worker in “The Mix” is responsible for the drowning of the captain and crew of a boat when he issues orders of his own, and in “Need,” the title and most nuanced story, Moody, though he thinks an educated young man is lying like all the rest, sells him some gasoline, which is currently in short supply, then finds himself drawn into the man’s life and sexually attracted to his English wife. In perhaps the most disturbing tale, “Hungry de Catch Me,” an African entertains hotel guests by stuffing his mouth with money and then spinning around, until one evening he loses his balance and falls.
Dark stories that are better at evoking than illuminating.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-57962-109-0
Page Count: 167
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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