A writer adept at long-form narrative delivers an uneven collection of short stories.
The author of Peculiar Ground (2018) reimagines familiar stories in the contemporary United Kingdom.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Orpheus, and Mary’s husband, Joseph, are among the figures Hughes-Hallett lifts from mythology, fairy tales, and other traditional forms for this collection. In reimagining these characters, the author is participating in a tradition as old as storytelling itself. Much of the appeal of borrowing well-known characters and time-honored tropes lies in making the familiar fresh again. Writers from Ovid to William Shakespeare to Angela Carter show readers why particular narratives and narrative types endure by making them newly relevant. Hughes-Hallett’s efforts to perform this same magic are mixed. Here, Mary Magdalen is a prostitute—not asserted in the New Testament but definitely an element of her legend—as well as an aesthetician who performs intimate waxes on clients. Psyche is a young woman so self-possessed and beautiful that she terrifies and enrages men. Actaeon is a wildly successful real estate agent and committed voyeur. Each of these stories has its charms, but none is particularly successful. Hughes-Hallett doesn’t seem to grasp that her Mary Magdalen is so much more interesting than the Jesus figure who beguiles her; indeed, Mary Magdalen’s attraction to this charismatic cypher is her least compelling feature. At the end of Psyche’s tale, the author switches to a sort of postmodern voice that doesn’t feel so much like an intriguing stylistic choice as like the author has lost interest in the story. And “Actaeon” suffers from two issues that are endemic in this collection. There is a heavy reliance on exposition, to the point that these tales read more like outlines for novels than short fictions. And these stories only come to life when knowledge of the source material isn’t necessary to find the story compelling. “Orpheus” is a fantastic piece of short fiction even if you don’t know anything about this musician as he appears in Greek poetry and multiple modern iterations. Hughes-Hallett’s Oz is an old man among many old men hanging around a hospital ward. “Some of them had big trainers, shiny white shoes made for athletes, but here nobody sprang, nobody leapt.” That’s excellent anyway, and it’s gorgeous if you know Oz’s Greek antecedent.
A writer adept at long-form narrative delivers an uneven collection of short stories.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-294009-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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