This self-indulgent right-wing reverie should have remained a private daydream.
Fifty years after 1984, a conservatives’ paradise finally gets totalitarianism right in this smug, dotty utopian fable.
New York City, circa 2034, lies prostrate before the forces of political correctness. Bankrupted by “Negro reparations” and hamstrung by a “Female Equality Legislation Measure,” the city has suspended emergency services and faces daily blackouts and soaring crime rates while the Oxbergers, Jewish owners of the New York Times, call for tolerance and understanding. When his Oxberger wife is raped and murdered by black men, humble oncologist Leonard Little inherits some Times voting stock and migrates to Dallas, capital of the breakaway Texas quasi-republic of Lodestar, a libertarian business haven and no-nonsense surveillance state. Unions are illegal, taxes are low, schools, hospitals and utilities have been privatized, companies are free to discriminate and college admissions are openly biased in favor of alumni donations and straight white males, statistically proven to return the greatest “LifeAchieve.” Meanwhile, a two-strikes-and-you’re-dead justice system quashes crime, citizens are monitored with “Geo-Locator[s]” and smokers are sentenced to re-education camps. Clean, safe and upscale, Dallas has no dystopian downside, the worst menace being a clownishly bigoted mayor whose excesses are reined in by enlightened LodeStar plutocrats. As Leonard becomes embroiled in a tedious scheme to bring the Times to Dallas, the narrative offers a plea for the rich to stop loathing themselves and reorder society to their satisfaction. White (Ernest, 2003) presents an unconvincing satirical extrapolation of today’s culture wars. His vision of urban apocalypse–minorities run amok, coddled by liberal elites–feels dated, and his fantasy of running the Times (in one scene, columnist Maureen Dowd, imagined as a truculent black woman, is brusquely fired) seems like a breakfast-table rant. And what’s to explain the random photos of Brazilian bathing beauties, except a trip to Rio by Leonard and his girlfriend?
This self-indulgent right-wing reverie should have remained a private daydream.Pub Date: July 18, 2005
ISBN: 1-4134-9309-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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