A timely yarn that, though a little obvious and a little clunky, makes for a provocative entertainment.
What if they gave a secession, and everybody came? Eco-activist McKibben (The Age of Missing Information, 1992, etc.) tries his hand at fiction, to mixed results.
There was a long-ago time, McKibben reminds his readers, when Vermont broke off from New York to form its own republic, which lasted for 14 years before it joined the U.S. So why not once again? It’s not as if the Berners would get the bomb. Instead, the independent Vermont dreamed of by old back-to-the-land-hippie protagonist Vern Barclay is a paradise of “Vermont milk, Vermont beer, Vermont music,” a place of a “free local economy, where neighbors make things for neighbors—and so they actually bother to give them some taste, body, and character.” It’s not just rhetoric; in a caper that opens McKibben’s yarn, secessionists hijack a Coors truck, explaining to the befuddled driver that since Vermont has “more breweries per capita than any place on earth,” there’s no real need for industrial beer from outside. That puts the secessionists on the wrong side of the law in a scene that could have come from Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, of which McKibben’s book might just as well have been a lost sequel, suitably updated so that the insurrectionists drive Subaru Foresters, work around Asperger’s syndrome, and ponder the reality of the system (“maybe Garth Brooks was real, in his own mind”). As with Abbey’s book, McKibben’s players are symbols as much as characters, acting out an idea. It’s a fable, in other words, and it gets a little didactic at times. McKibben admits as much, writing in an author’s note that the message isn’t necessarily that the nation should splinter so much as that “when confronted by small men doing big and stupid things”—and we all know who he means—“we need to resist with all the creativity and wit we can muster.”
A timely yarn that, though a little obvious and a little clunky, makes for a provocative entertainment.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1986-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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