Not even a writer of McCall Smith’s benevolence can provide a happy ending for every character who deserves it here. But he...
The creator of Mma Precious Ramotswe and chronicler of 44 Scotland St. (A Time of Love and Tartan, 2018, etc.) spins a heartwarming tale of love won and lost and won again during and after World War II.
Valerie Eliot, a member of the Women’s Land Army assigned to help out at Archie Wilkinson’s farm, falls in love with American pilot Mike Rogers, and he with her. They get engaged and she gets pregnant, though not in that order, but then Mike gets shot down over occupied Holland together with his unnamed navigator and their mascot, Peter Woodhouse, a sheepdog. Even as Val is painfully schooling herself to relinquish the flickering hope that her bridegroom is still alive, Mike, his navigator, and Peter Woodhouse are rescued by sympathetic locals and improbably protected by Cpl. Karl "Ubi" Dietrich, an occupying officer unsympathetic to the war who thinks its end is so near that there’s no point in killing them or turning them in. The end of the war that Ubi has so accurately forecast sends Mike and Peter Woodhouse back to Val in what would feel like a happy ending if it didn’t come at the story’s halfway point, but a surprising number of tests and tribulations still await Val, Mike, Ubi, and Peter Woodhouse. Indeed, this is one of the author’s most resolutely plotted novels since his rewriting of Emma (2015): although the characters display limited possibilities for development, the postwar world proves quite as challenging, and as generous in the opportunities it offers for love and courage and forgiveness, as the world at war.
Not even a writer of McCall Smith’s benevolence can provide a happy ending for every character who deserves it here. But he leaves you thinking that they’ve each had a bite of the apple and that all in all, that’s a pretty wonderful gift to have been granted.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4753-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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