Rennie is a free-lance Toronto journalist in her thirties. She's recently had a partial mastectomy; she has lost her live-in lover; she has entertained a brief but one-way crush on her doctor. Moreover, her apartment has been broken into. Not unexpectedly, then, all of this proves to be entirely too much for Rennie—so she wheedles a travel-piece assignment from a friendly magazine editor and flies down to the Caribbean island-state of St. Antoine for a spell of rest. It turns out, of course, to be nothing of the sort. The hotel is crummy, Rennie's lonely, the food is awful. And what human contacts she does make are at best ambiguous. A drug-dealer named Paul provides Rennie's first sex since her operation: "she enters her body again and there's a moment of pain, incarnation, this may only be the body's desperation, a flareup, a last clutch at the world before the long slide into final illness and death; but meanwhile she's solid after all, she's still here on the earth, she's grateful, he's touching her, she can still be touched." And a hang-about woman named Lora involves the unwitting Rennie in a gun-smuggling errand. (Lora's lover, Prince, is vying for control of the island's government.) Finally, then: there's a brief futile attempt at a revolution (worthy of operetta); it's crushed; and Lora and Rennie are jailed—and mistreated. True, Atwood's scenario here, banal as it is, supports an incline of conclusions: that sex is at base an aggression of power, if not full-out violence; that no matter how civilized, we are never beyond "bodily harm"—sexual, medical, or political; that knowing we are all equally vulnerable is a sort of rescue, even luck. But Atwood has, in Life Before Man especially, previously embodied the same dark philosophy in a more artful, far less didactic way. And the Final scenes of degradation are so appallingly immediate that they echo back on what then seems like an overly-long and mostly empty narrative corridor leading up to them. Still: strong work, reflecting a powerfully bleak vision—though too obvious and linear for fully satisfying fiction.
Pub Date: March 20, 1982
ISBN: 0385491077
Page Count: -
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1982
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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