At best, a qualified success. Dark’s most accomplished work thus far remains her short fiction.
A lonely woman’s painfully extended rite of passage is compassionately explored in this affecting, though uneven first novel by storywriter Dark (In the Gloaming, 2000, etc.).
It’s 1969 when we first meet protagonist Jane, the precociously introspective nine-year-old daughter of successful Pennsylvania surgeon Emlin MacLeod and his extroverted wife “Via” (Olivia), as their family of six eagerly await the Beatles’ first American TV appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Echoes of Robb Forman Dew’s domestic psychological studies are sounded gracefully in these early pages, which efficiently dramatize Jane’s secretiveness (she’s writing a story, which, she’ll later realize, “was meant to be a study of how a family pulls together to handle adversity”) and helpless love for the overburdened Emlin, as well as the emerging cracks in her parents’ seemingly perfect marriage. Later episodes observe Jane at age 24 as a tourist living in London in the orbits of a pair of glamorous poseurs whose affectations (as Dark acknowledges) resemble the behavior of Evelyn Waugh’s Bridesheads and an older American writer still “technically married” and emotionally unavailable; then in 2000, herself the single mother of nine-year-old Emily, back in America and returned home for Via’s 65th birthday party—during which both a long-delayed confrontation between mother and daughter, and the possibility of their reconciliation, finally occur. Think of England (its title a stiff-upper-lip mantra chanted by the veddy British side of Jane’s family) is smoothly written, and initially quite engaging, but founders when Jane (herself a well-portrayed and interesting character) plays second fiddle to her London chums, mercurial Colette and soulfully gay Nigel (both clichés), and obsesses over novelist Clay(ton) West, an idea who never comes to life. Only Jane’s globe-hopping gay Uncle Francis manages to liven things up occasionally.
At best, a qualified success. Dark’s most accomplished work thus far remains her short fiction.Pub Date: May 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-86522-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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