Not Norman’s finest work but an intriguing attempt to complicate his usual concerns.
A man’s anguish over his wife’s murder—soon to be a major motion picture—blurs his grasp of reality in the latest moody, Halifax-set tale by Norman (What Is Left the Daughter, 2010; Devotion, 2007, etc.).
Sam Lattimore, the narrator of Norman’s eighth novel, is in mourning: As the story opens, it’s been almost a year and a half since his wife, Elizabeth, was killed by a bellman at the Halifax hotel where they lived. And while he has sensibly taken on a therapist to work through his grief, he less-than-sensibly insists that he often sees Elizabeth on a beach at night, putting piles of books in order. Sam grudgingly sold the rights to the tragedy to a director, but the filming is doing little to help him achieve closure, a word he can’t stand anyway. In brief, episodic chapters, Norman shuttles between Sam’s present-day processing and his memories of life with Elizabeth, particularly her obsession with the British author Marghanita Laski (1915-1988) and the increasingly unwelcome and threatening advances she endured by the bellman. The quirky, downbeat milieu is typical of Norman’s fiction, which balances an obsession with specific details about time and place with more high-flown musings on morality and love. Here, Norman is chiefly concerned with the subjectivity of history, which he explores in terms of Sam's remembrances of Elizabeth, his unshakable visions of her and the filmmaker’s rewriting of their lives. This high-concept stuff sometimes works at a low boil: Much of Sam’s narration comes in the context of his therapist appointments, which makes the reality-versus-fantasy debate feel too neatly framed, more discussed than described. But while that dampens the impact of Sam’s emotional unraveling, it’s a beguiling tale overall, a novel Paul Auster might write after a trip to Canada’s Eastern shore.
Not Norman’s finest work but an intriguing attempt to complicate his usual concerns.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-547-71212-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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