How "the Troubles" of Anglo-Irish history affect life on one small island off the coast of county Cork is just one of the many quiet revelations in this thoroughly engaging, deceptively charming fiction by a modern master. Much of the narrative force here derives from the subtle design and the economical portraiture. Trevor wastes little time in suggesting that something dark and resonant with history will overwhelm the wide-eyed innocence displayed by Sarah Pollenfax when she first arrives at Carriglas, the "green rock" of an island lorded over for centuries by her distant relatives. The daughter of a penurious clergyman, Sarah enters a magical time at Carriglas as governess to her cousins, the children of the widowed Colonel Rolleston, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who, with his mother's help, oversees the family estate. But this is all before WW I—which claims the Colonel—and before the Republic of Ireland—which ends years of Protestant privilege. When Sarah returns (at the aged Mrs. Rolleston's invitation) to Carriglas in 1931, she begins to discover how many of the more recent mysteries are rooted in that "idyll of a lazy summer" in 1904. To her horror, she learns that her cousins, along with her brother Hugh, once played a creel game with the son of a tenant farmer, and that, years later, the revolution provided cover for the Catholic boy's revenge—a bomb meant for the Rolleston children killed their butler Linchy instead. The cousins, forever penitent, enact their guilt with rituals of abasement and resignation—Villana marries a boorish barrister much older then she, and her brother John James takes up with a fat old Catholic widow. And Mrs. Rolleston, ever kind and generous, provides for young Tom, the illegitimate son of Linchy and the Catholic maid, Brigid. When the family extinguishes itself through self-punishment—none of them produces offspring—what's left of the estate passes to Tom, himself the bastard child of history. The rich array of life on the quay, and the comedy of aristocrats gone to seed, make this otherwise sorrowful story all the more affecting.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1988
ISBN: 0140127127
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988
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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