Engrossing and provocative: a scarlet narrative thread reminds us how magical the novel can be in telling stories and lives.
With her usual deftness and clarity, Drabble (The Seven Sisters, 2002, etc.) crosses cultures and centuries, linking the story of an 18th-century Korean Crown Princess with that of a British scholar attending a conference in Seoul.
“Ancient Times” presents the Yi period memoir of the Crown Princess: she’s married at ten; consummates the marriage at 15; loses her first-born in infancy; has a second son, who will become king, and two daughters; watches her husband succumb to madness, slaughter his concubine, and be killed by his own father; and somehow survives into her 70s before dying, to watch over future centuries with curiosity and a wish to have her story revived. “Modern Times” follows the trail of British scholar Babs Halliwell, 42, who travels to a conference in Seoul, carrying an anonymously sent copy of the Crown Princess’s memoirs. Reading the memoir on the flight, Dr. Halliwell finds herself entranced, supernaturally enchanted. “The princess is taking her over, bodily and mentally . . . . The princess has entered her, like an alien creature in a science-fiction movie, and she is gestating and growing within her.” Dr. Halliwell, like the Crown Princess, has a mad husband and lost her firstborn to a genetic illness. She craves a red silk blouse, scarlet stockings—as the Crown Princess once craved a red silk skirt. A Korean doctor takes her to visit the Crown Princess’s gardens and other key sites. She tells the story of the Crown Princess to the conference star, Jan van Joost, which leads to a three-day romantic liaison. Jan asks her advice about adopting a Chinese baby girl with his much younger and eccentric Spanish-Swedish third wife, then dies of a heart attack. The third part, “Postmodern Times,” is a mysterious and mostly effective melding of all the story’s strands.
Engrossing and provocative: a scarlet narrative thread reminds us how magical the novel can be in telling stories and lives.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-101106-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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