An admirable diversion into alternative history and humanity’s inherent nature that plays to the author’s strengths.
A trio of government-engineered superheroes navigate a war-torn, divided nation: the United States of America.
Gallagher debuted with a savagely funny memoir (Kaboom, 2010, etc.) and followed it up with a novel, Youngblood (2016). Here, he pivots to an alternate version of America that’s just recognizable but radically different due to a few twists in history. In this present, the U.S. won the Vietnam War, but chaos still reigns in the streets of the country 30 years later, wracked by seemingly unending wars overseas and terrorist violence at home on the part of extremist groups who oppose the administration’s authoritarian approach to most issues, especially domestic policies. The aforementioned superbeings, created with space rocks called cythrax, are Peter Swenson, able to turn invisible; Grady Flowers, whose superstrength belies his vigilant nature; and Jean-Jacques Saint-Preux, a man granted Flash-like speed but unable to run back to his beloved war. They’re impatiently waiting for orders in Empire City, an expanded version of New York. Our everyday characters are Sebastian Rios, an unremarkable bureaucrat infamous for being kidnapped in the Middle East, and his childhood friend Mia Tucker, who participated in the special forces raid that freed him. As you might expect, there are dubious characters too, including fugitive freedom fighter Jonah Gray, who is using his guerrilla faction, the Mayday Front, to terrorize Empire City, and Maj. Gen. Jackie “Jackpot” Collins, a fiercely pro-war presidential candidate who may not have the country’s best interests at heart. Gallagher’s prose is more elaborate than in his previous work, and because he doesn’t spoon-feed readers the plot, they may find themselves pushing pins in a conspiracy board, Watchmen-style, to follow along. That said, there’s a lot to take in here, including acute explorations of America’s current political and ideological divisions, the heavy responsibility superheroes would be forced to shoulder in real life, and a keen extrapolation of a country launched down a radically altered historical continuum.
An admirable diversion into alternative history and humanity’s inherent nature that plays to the author’s strengths.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7779-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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