Slow and somewhat aimless, but a nice account all the same of youth lusting after experience.
Booker-winner MacLaverty (Grace Notes, 1997, etc.) portrays the coming of age of three Belfast boys during the early 1970s.
Although it’s pretty much the norm for adolescent boys the world over to feel cooped up and suffocated, in Northern Ireland this could be considered a rational understanding of the situation. Especially in the post-Beatles age, the provincial sectarianism of Belfast must have seemed rather galling to those who were just on the cusp of discovering the world for the first time. MacLaverty here takes us through the last year of high school with three Catholic boys who are all, in different ways, butting their heads against the same brick wall of complacent ignorance. Martin Brennan is the most sensitive of the three: a diligent but slow student, he is trying for the second time in two years to pass his examinations and qualify for a civil service job—but keeps coming back to the question of whether he should enter a religious order as a welcome escape from the harsh realities of life on the outside. Martin’s friends Kavanagh and Foley are also products of Belfast, and they have similar frustrations seen from very different perspectives: Foley is a foul-mouthed rebel who scoffs at the Church and scorns Belfast (“A godforsaken backwater where they lock up the swings on a Sunday”), while Kavanagh has fallen in love with the Protestant Philippa Dobson, who not only refuses to sleep with him but wants him to accept Jesus as his savior. This is a leisurely old-fashioned Bildungsroman in which much of the attention is devoted to the discovery of new ideas, and the arguments that they engender among the young, and the sense of nostalgia is palpable from the start. By the end, Martin has changed as much as Belfast (and the world) has.
Slow and somewhat aimless, but a nice account all the same of youth lusting after experience.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-05052-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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