This is British writer Coe's fourth novel but his first to appear in the US, and it's easy to see why American publishers have hesitated to introduce him here. Funny and ambitious, his scathing social satire of England in the 1980s relies on a familiarity with domestic politics, as well as with British popular culture. The very subtitle of this panoramic narrative derives from a third-rate British horror film from the early '60s, starring the sexy Shirley Eaton, whose curvaceousness plays an important role in the fantasy lives of more than one character in this rollicking novel. Michael Owen, for one, the author of two critically respected novels, finds himself (circa 1982) engaged to write the family history of the Winshaws, a wealthy and powerful clan described by one repentant member as ``the meanest, greediest, cruellest bunch of back-stabbing, penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled across the face of the earth.'' The family is behind every excess and degradation of the '80s: the overblown art market, the rise of tabloid journalism, the decline of small farms, the privatization of health care, the unscrupulous dealing in arms to Iraq, and the creation of paper wealth characteristic of the decade. Measuring the consequences of their evil in personal terms, Owen finds a Winshaw behind every private misery and tragedy. This, and a revelation about his own past, renders him more or less mute for two years. His only relief comes from masturbating to the image of Shirley Eaton on his VCR. What he doesn't discover until well into this surprisingly neat narrative is just how much his life is intertwined with this horrible family, and that the mad, institutionalized Tabitha Winshaw, with her accusations of truly horrific Winshaw betrayals, is absolutely correct. Something of a Labourite Tom Wolfe, Coe seems a bit naive politically, with his monolithic view of evil. Nevertheless, he has just the right narrative brio to pull off this wild, satisfying novel.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43385-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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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