Moderately engaging, here and there. But there’s no real passion in it, and the end result is tepid.
“Is true love possible between men and women?” asks the protagonist of this earnest second full-length fiction from the British screenwriter (Shadowlands, Gladiator) and novelist (The Society of Others, 2005).
The questioner is John “Bron” Dearborn, a writer of sorts who’s dismissed by his London flatmate (and former lover) Anna, just as he’s been commissioned to compose a book about the phenomenon of love at first sight. While staying with a friend in Devon, Bron experiences an epiphanic rapture upon sighting distractingly beautiful Flora Freeman (his fellow house guest)—a moment Bron instantly likens to the similar experience undergone by his book’s central subject: the fictional French Post-Impressionist Paul Marotte. Helplessly smitten, Bron courts the mercurial Flora (the itinerant wife of a rich older husband, who’s either endlessly indulgent or utterly indifferent to her). But she keeps sending mixed signals, first responding to Bron’s ardor, then quickly retreating from him. Help is offered by E.F. “Freddy” Christiansen, an independently wealthy Marotte scholar-collector—and Flora’s old friend—who also aids Bron’s researches, and arranges a rendezvous at his home in Switzerland, where Bron learns bitter lessons about the elusiveness of love and the difficulty of authenticating what our deepest instincts tell us must be real. The novel begins sluggishly, and marches somewhat stolidly in place, until Freddy’s Machiavellian posturing adds some much-needed malicious humor. Nicholson deftly layers in allusions to famous lovers (e.g., Bacall and Bogart, Victorian adventurer Richard Burton and his Isabell) who fit Bron’s thesis, and builds a beguiling house of cards surrounding the indistinct figures of Marotte and his beloved subject, English governess Kate Summer. But it’s all a setup, and neither the novel’s unsurprising payoff nor its annoyingly phony happy ending justify the redundant oversimplifications that lead up to them.
Moderately engaging, here and there. But there’s no real passion in it, and the end result is tepid.Pub Date: March 21, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51625-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
