Galgut’s prose has a spare beauty, suggesting volcanic emotions held rigorously in check. A remarkable achievement.
This fine, bleak tale about a fugitive’s crack-up was written ten years ago, while South African Galgut’s The Good Doctor (2004) made the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize.
A very tall white man is walking along an empty road across the veldt. Unnamed, the man is a fugitive, although from what we don’t know. He has managed to lose the police helicopters. A car passes. The driver, a minister on his way to a new job in a township, gives him a ride and buys him breakfast. In his way, the minister is as desperate as the fugitive. When he propositions the fugitive, the fugitive kills him with a rock, then buries him in a quarry. He drives to the township, claims to be the minister, and is taken in by the woman in the mission house. A complication ensues when the car is burgled and one of the thieves, Valentine, is arrested, while his brother, Small, is found hiding in the quarry, alongside the corpse. The police captain, Mong, has the two put on trial for murder. The guilt-stricken fugitive confesses that he’s not the minister and takes to the road again. Valentine, too, is on the run, having escaped custody. A vigilante mob screams for vengeance and a solar eclipse adds an apocalyptic touch. Mong pursues the fugitive on foot, obsessively, across a parched landscape, and in this dance of death, the men’s identities seem to merge. The fugitive looks “haggard and mad and remarkable.” Mong is “ragged and reeking.” Valentine appears “crazed and messianic.” In the end, it scarcely matters that the fugitive is shot dead by Mong while Valentine survives, for we know that his fate will be as miserable as that of the dead man. The legal niceties of criminal punishment pale beside the solitary despair that these men cannot escape.
Galgut’s prose has a spare beauty, suggesting volcanic emotions held rigorously in check. A remarkable achievement.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-4161-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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