Winner of the Whitbread Award when it was first published, this is a buoyant collection that’s not just for Gardam...
Two boys from different social classes become friends for life; their families follow suit.
These linked stories from 1981 join last year’s reissue of A Long Way From Verona; both predate by many years the English author’s acclaimed Old Filth trilogy. Up in Westmorland, in England’s far north, farmers have worked the land for hundreds of years. By the 1970s they have started summer rentals for “incomers.” So the Batemans from London rent from the Teesdales. Things start badly. Mr. Bateman is a journalist who needs peace and quiet; the racket of harvest time almost drives him back to London. The mothers save the day, with behind-the-scenes help from their sons: Bell Teesdale, who’s 8, and Harry Bateman, a good bit younger. The kids hit it off from the get-go. Harry becomes so fluent in the local dialect that Bell teasingly reproves him, “Speak right, can’t yer. You’ll finish up a savage.” He mentors little Harry, showing him a secret opening to an abandoned silver mine, where a rock fall traps them. The lads get trapped again in a huge snowstorm, and when Harry begs Bell to save them, the older boy, in an echo of A.A. Milne, “felt very young indeed.” Familiar childhood escapades, yes, but Gardam makes them glow by seeing them through a child’s eyes, as she did in Verona. She gives weight to the tall tales and ghost stories of the region but is not above tweaking them mischievously. Only in the last story (“Tomorrow’s Arrangements”) does she fumble. A distant relative, a smooth operator, arrives from Brazil to lay claim to the farmhouse the Batemans still rent in 1999; it’s an improbable, large-scale development in a work whose success is tied to the small-scale.
Winner of the Whitbread Award when it was first published, this is a buoyant collection that’s not just for Gardam completists.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60945-246-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
IN THE NEWS
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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