Updike's long interest in African literature was bound to up and produce something like this eventually. Hakim Felix Ellellou, college-educated in Wisconsin, is the dictator of Kush (called Noire when it was French), a sub-Saharan dustbowl of such proportions that even the government doesn't know what's going on in some of the distanter reaches. By dint of a cleverly deduced belief in government-by-mythology, Ellellou rules quite nicely, thank you; things are kept under control by Islam, a Russian-cozy socialism (the Soviets have got a secret missile base planted in the drought-parched, famine-reeling north), and Ellellou's penchant for incognito tours of the country. When the Americans try sending in food aid (Kix, Total, and other junk cereals), Ellellou has the stuff burned. But the Americans are not so easily daunted; a deal for oil-leasing rights is secretly being negotiated by Ellellou's second-in-command, a technocrat with one eye on the World Bank. And suddenly there are signs—like rock music, jeans, Women's Lib, and MacDonalds—that speak of change for Kush. This being Updike, all the Africana fits tight as a glove, well-researched and intellectually digested. (The Africans, for instance, speak in an excruciatingly rhetorical style, counterpointed by the hilarious folksiness of the Americans, one of whom is Candace, Ellellou's third wife of four, whom he met in Wisconsin and brought home.) The general play of intelligence over this novel's surfaces is exquisite; the wry, moralistic denouement—America wins, but what?—is combed into lots of smart political, sociological, or economic opinions. But Updike is not basically a comic writer—comedy makes him tighten his grip and get manically inventive and crabbed; so whole sections here are as hard as walnuts to get through. As intellectual tour de force, The Coup scores fairly well. As serious work, even serious comedy, it never invites any species of emotional involvement—and never straightens out its curlicues enough to hit home.
Pub Date: Dec. 7, 1978
ISBN: 0449242595
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1978
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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