Malicious fun, with a very keen edge. Wilson’s most abrasively entertaining yet.
Readers who treasure Evelyn Waugh’s nasty 1938 comic masterpiece Scoop (and we are legion) will rejoice to find it reborn in the tireless British author’s saber-toothed 18th novel.
A superbly sleazy Fleet Street rag, The Legion—surely inspired by Waugh’s Daily Beast—wages war on truth, justice and its publisher Lennox “Lennie” Mark’s many, many enemies. Chief among them is former army officer turned radical Anglican priest Vivyan Chell, from whose deathbed the tale of The Legion’scrimes and its minions’ messily intertwined lives begins to unfold. Father Vivyan’s adventures in political sabotage have undermined the misrule of moribund African nation Zariya’s thuggish General Bindinga—the ill-gotten gains from whose atrocities provide The Legion’s primary financial support. Variously involved co-conspirators and observers include failed poet and all-purpose columnist L.P. Watson (certainly we may be forgiven for detecting just a hint of A.N. Wilson in him); his gossipy confidante, Mary Mulch, editor of the superslick Gloss; still-idealistic arts editor Rachel Pearl and the several males (including L.P.) who admire her journalistic and other chops; Lennie Mark’s bisexual Euro-trash wife Martina (a wonderful caricature: too bad the middle-aged Lotte Lenya isn’t around to portray her); West Indian beauty Mercy d’Abo, and her emotionally disturbed biracial bastard teenaged son Peter, whose schizophrenic outbursts have much to do with this busy story’s precipitous pitch forward into hell. My Name is Legion (whose wry title nicely suggests its satanic content) is an all-out, take-no-prisoners encyclopedic satire, which may push rather more buttons than it needs to (even the Queen takes her lumps, in a memorably snotty aside). But it plays fair, finding genuine heroism in those (notably Father Chell) who oppose The Legion’s reductive trashings and otherwise subtly celebrating the political, religious and artistic standards from which it has so egregiously fallen.
Malicious fun, with a very keen edge. Wilson’s most abrasively entertaining yet.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-21742-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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