How "the Troubles" of Anglo-Irish history affect life on one small island off the coast of county Cork is just one of the many quiet revelations in this thoroughly engaging, deceptively charming fiction by a modern master. Much of the narrative force here derives from the subtle design and the economical portraiture. Trevor wastes little time in suggesting that something dark and resonant with history will overwhelm the wide-eyed innocence displayed by Sarah Pollenfax when she first arrives at Carriglas, the "green rock" of an island lorded over for centuries by her distant relatives. The daughter of a penurious clergyman, Sarah enters a magical time at Carriglas as governess to her cousins, the children of the widowed Colonel Rolleston, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who, with his mother's help, oversees the family estate. But this is all before WW I—which claims the Colonel—and before the Republic of Ireland—which ends years of Protestant privilege. When Sarah returns (at the aged Mrs. Rolleston's invitation) to Carriglas in 1931, she begins to discover how many of the more recent mysteries are rooted in that "idyll of a lazy summer" in 1904. To her horror, she learns that her cousins, along with her brother Hugh, once played a creel game with the son of a tenant farmer, and that, years later, the revolution provided cover for the Catholic boy's revenge—a bomb meant for the Rolleston children killed their butler Linchy instead. The cousins, forever penitent, enact their guilt with rituals of abasement and resignation—Villana marries a boorish barrister much older then she, and her brother John James takes up with a fat old Catholic widow. And Mrs. Rolleston, ever kind and generous, provides for young Tom, the illegitimate son of Linchy and the Catholic maid, Brigid. When the family extinguishes itself through self-punishment—none of them produces offspring—what's left of the estate passes to Tom, himself the bastard child of history. The rich array of life on the quay, and the comedy of aristocrats gone to seed, make this otherwise sorrowful story all the more affecting.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1988
ISBN: 0140127127
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988
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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