Irish writer Doyle's fourth novel (The Van, The Snapper, etc.)—and the just-announced 1993 Booker Prize winner: a story that depicts with remarkable acuity that extraordinary intensity of response that is at the heart of childhood. Doyle, who's limned with wry affection the lives of families in Dublin's working-class neighborhoods, here makes ten-year-old Paddy Clarke of Barrytown, Dublin, his narrator. Barrytown, a suburb once on the edge of the city, is now increasingly surrounded by new public-housing projects—a situation that makes for a certain uneasiness since the Barrytowners themselves are barely holding onto their own hard-won middle-class respectability. But for Paddy, best friend Kevin, and the rest of the gang, these construction sites are the playgrounds of choice—rich sources of useful material and the perfect settings for mischief. Paddy, who lives with his three siblings and parents in a modest house—the only one with a room his mother insists on calling "the drawing room"—details in vivid colloquialisms his pranks, his dreams, and the wonderfully imaginative if harmlessly naughty games children devise when released from TV's bondage. Paddy is increasingly troubled, though, by the fear that he will, like friends Aidan and Charles, lose a parent. He loves his parents dearly and—aware of their fights, his mother's unhappiness, and his father's drinking- -tries desperately to intervene, often staying awake all night ("I was on guard...all I had to do was stay awake..."). Preoccupied and unhappy, he plans to run away, but his father leaves first. And Paddy knows then that "tomorrow or the day after my ma was going to call me over to her and was going to say—You're the man of the house now, Patrick." Perhaps too many anecdotes of boys beings boys, but Doyle has rendered childhood as it really is: a time of brutal absolutes, of boundless possibilities, and of dark, inconsolable griefs. A work of maturity and grace.
Pub Date: Dec. 16, 1993
ISBN: 0140233903
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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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