Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (44 page)

The Companions

by Sheri S. Tepper

Eos, 464 pages, hardback, 2003

I'm an enormous fan of Tepper's, and avidly read everything she publishes, even while recognizing that her novels are somewhat uneven; at their best they define a subgenre of sf that would best be called "science fantasy" had not that term been appropriated elsewhere; and even when they're not so good they're almost always engaging and readable, and always with a subtext that's of interest.
The Companions
is one of the not-so-good ones, alas, but you won't believe me on this until you get within about fifty pages of the end, when suddenly what has so far been a spectacularly successful novel collapses amid hurried, chaotic, and just outright bad plotting.

Civilization on Earth has reached a ghastly phase, dreadful overpopulation having created an era of gross repression that includes a powerful move to exterminate all nonhuman animals; dog-loving Jewel (a typical Tepper heroine: studious and enormously attractive) is glad of the opportunity to assist her linguist half-brother on the distant, undeveloped planet Moss (shades of the planet Grass, featured in some of Tepper's best work), where among the riddles presented by the world is whether or not the inhabitants are truly intelligent. The solution to this particular mystery is masterful, and it leads to a far greater realm of discovery than anyone could possibly have imagined – in which realm the presence of Jewel's dogs is crucial.

Unfortunately, faced with the task of producing a resolution to the enormously complex scenario she's created, Tepper in effect bottles out. I exhort you to read the first 400 pages or so of
The Companions
– you'd be hard pressed to find a better 400 pages of sf anywhere – and then to let your mind start dreaming up its own possible resolutions of the whole.

—Crescent Blues

Singer from the Sea

by Sheri S. Tepper

Avon, 426 pages, hardback, 1999

If the term "science fantasy" hadn't already been taken, someone should have applied it to the works of Sheri S. Tepper: novels like
Grass
(1989),
Raising the Stones
(1990) and
The Awakeners
(1987) offer a supremely satisfying blend between genuine science fiction and equally genuine fantasy. Some of her earlier fictions were in fact pure fantasy, with no sciencefictional content whatsoever – for example,
Blood Heritage
(1986) and
The Bones
(1987), not to mention the
Marianne
trilogy (1985–9) – but thereafter she established and developed this delicate fusion, with even a novel like
Beauty
(1991), a worthy addition to that body of novels based on the Beauty and the Beast legend (and in this case on Sleeping Beauty as well), being as much sf as fantasy. In more recent years, however, the balance of the blend has shifted markedly: starting around the time of
A Plague of Angels
(1993), Tepper's novels have veered more towards science fantasy in the more orthodox sense of the term, with the sciencefictional aspects playing second fiddle to the fantasy ambience to such an extent that it's almost as if they had been, rather irritably, stuck in to make sure Tepper didn't lose her stall in the sf marketplace. Science fantasies are not necessarily bad novels, of course – although her
Gibbon's Decline and Fall
(1996) was a major disappointment – but they do not normally make rewarding subjects for analysis.

Singer from the Sea
is very definitely an orthodox science fantasy. The descendants of the colonists on the planet Haven have formed a society that is a vile aristocratic patriarchy – two societies, in fact, each as bad as the other. The women of the lower orders have a reasonable degree of autonomy, but those of the aristocratic classes are expected by their fathers and husbands to be little more than decorative sex-toys and child-bearers. Among the many limitations imposed on them is that they are forbidden to sing.

Genevieve, our heroine, is not initially rebellious, or even that way inclined, despite her possession of a formidable intellect and psychic powers. She is, however, a little
different
, in that her equally formidable mother, now long dead, taught her to exercise her mind, to develop her powers and, most important of all, to sing – all of which she does in secrecy. Her spirit is kindled when her militaristic buffoon of a father determines to marry her off to the vile Prince Delganor, who has ambitions to take over the world; Genevieve, despite the fact that aristocrats should wed only aristocrats, has fallen in love with the well thewed New Man commoner Aufors Leys. In the course of their adventures towards a reconciliation of true love, they discover that the incredible longevity of the most senior aristocratic males relies on a drug that can be derived only through the murder of young women, preferably suckling mothers; and that individual living beings do not have souls but only (as it were) shares of the much grander entities that are the souls of worlds – a very pretty idea with obvious eco-conscious connotations. Genevieve, through learning to sing to the planet's soul, becomes a saviour of her world, and possibly of all the human universe; Aufors becomes – well, Aufors sort of fades about two-thirds of the way through and becomes her loyal if faceless sidekick. Various lesser characters achieve their own transcendences, while the bad guys get splatted in one way or another.

The telling throughout has an aura of high fantasy, so one wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if a dragon popped out from behind a rock or a wizened witch waved a wand and explained everything. In fact, the technological underpinning that explains this strange longevity drug – the reason why its parent plant will grow only when sprinkled with the blood of young mothers – is of the order that is so sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic, and most of the rest of the technology is likewise – for example, there is an unexplained hi-tech means of bringing rare and threatened animals from other worlds (like unicorns, perhaps?) to be released into the Eden that is Haven. The plot of the book, too, follows one of the classic fantasy templates: there is wrongness in the land; there is a period of transition; virtue triumphs as everything is set in its rightful place at last (or again). In this instance there's even the standard element of the under-rated person who proves to be the rightful monarch; granted this person is female rather than the more usual male (the mocked kitchen urchin becomes king), but even this is nowadays not an uncommon high-fantasy spin. There are visitors from other planets, but they could as easily be from across the seas – very easily, in this instance, because Tepper has chosen to restrict the landmasses of her world to only two medium-sized and neighbouring islands, all the rest being ocean.

One is accustomed to high fantasies being judgeable only in terms of how well or badly their tales are told – rarely do they actually
mean
anything (and many readers of high fantasy would run a mile if they did) – but this is Tepper, and so there are morals to be drawn. The first of these is ecological, as noted, and this is nicely enough handled; all of the familiar Tepper elegance of thought is on display here. The second, expectably from Tepper, is feministic, and unfortunately here her touch deserts her: the message is put across clumsily, and is based on false premises.

The aristocratic males are, of course, the villains of the piece; and the message presumably is that, if given the chance and the right combination of circumstances,
any
male has at least the potential to act similarly – to countenance the mass murder of "mere" women in order to prolong his own existence and thereby increase or extend his power. This is of course arrant nonsense, and one suspects Tepper realized as much full well by the time she was halfway through writing the novel and spent the rest of the time trying desperately to cover up the foolishness of the premise. Certainly this is the case if we are to deduce correctly from her handling of one of the semi-major characters, the battle-hardened tactician who is Genevieve's father – "Arthur Lord Dustin, Duke of Langmarsh, Earl of Evermire etcetera, Councilor to the Lord Paramount and Marshal of the Royal Armies", no less. The Marshal starts off as a militarist of unusually rigid mind (an odd failing for a brilliant tactician?) but, as he is drawn into the evil plot of his male peers, becomes a complete caricature – he is the stiff retired major whom bit-part character actors made a living out of portraying in countless half-forgotten black-and-white B-movies, but with a dash of malevolence added – and no attitude becomes too stupid for him to adopt. Alongside him, the wicked Prince Delganor, engaged in countless subtle machinations of the sort that might seem brilliantly Machiavellian to schoolyard kids, becomes ever more implausibly loathsome. There is also a Shah; he cannot really be called a character because all he is is a cardboard despot who behaves in ways that would give religious fundamentalists of any stripe (although clearly Islamic despotism is Tepper's target) pause for thought. Yes, there are a few males among the good guys, but almost without exception (the exception being the very daintily painted minor character Jeorfy) they, like Aufors Leys, become or have always been mere cyphers – as if they
have
to be cyphers because otherwise, being males, their only possible characteristic could be brutishness.

All of this does not do the feminist cause any favours; indeed, to weight the scales against the male characters of
Singer from the Sea
in this way is to patronize the females, as if they were pretty little empty-heads who could not compete in a world where men might be intelligent, strong-willed, free-minded, and so forth. If, for example, as I've pointed out when discussing other feminist fictions, all the blacks in a novel were portrayed as inevitably either brutish or vacuous, there would quite rightly be an uproar; feminist propaganda is not at all assisted by the use of the same tactics as are deployed in racist propaganda.

This book does have redeeming qualities, however. Tepper has always been a mighty good storyteller, and for large stretches of the novel this quality shines through – although it is somewhat undermined by frequent interruptions of the flow caused by poor editing (not to mention sloppy proofreading). First-draft-style clumsinesses abound – irritating word repetitions and the like – and some passages are quite frankly astonishing in their crudity:

He gave her a look of tragic intensity and went to gasp for breath outside the room, while she, inside the room, did the same.

At which high dramatic moment of romantic tragedy Tonstant Weader, of course, rocked with laughter, all the involving power of the preceding pages effectively dissipated.

Although
Singer from the Sea
is a poor thing by Tepper's standards, those standards have generally been high – and so perhaps we shouldn't complain too much.

—unknown venue

Terror Firma

by Matthew Thomas

Voyager, 437 pages, paperback, 2000

The premise of this book is that every conspiracy theory you ever heard about is true, and in fact all part of a single conspiracy theory, which is that a small coterie of unimaginably wealthy humans rule the world with the assistance of alien UFOnauts, whose own ultimate objective is conquest of our planet. Approximately.

Investigating this state of affairs are: a rogue US Government covert operative, Frank; the editor of a small-circulation UFO magazine, Dave; and Dave's permanently off-again tv production assistant girlfriend, Kate. They are opposed and eventually (when he rebels against his masters) assisted by the coterie's even more covert enforcement officer, Becker. The trail takes them over most of the globe until they reach a final cataclysmic confrontation with the aliens on a remote mountainside in the distant, backward nation of Urgistan.

This all sounds like the recipe for either nonstop pulse-pounding hilarity or a Dan Brown novel, right? Unfortunately, wrong. Well,
Terror Firma
is certainly sometimes funnier than a Dan Brown novel, except for those with the most masochistic sense of humour, but pulse-pounding hilarity it ain't.

Matthew Thomas is an author desperately in need of an editor. In the first place he needs an editor to trim down his text, primarily with the aim of sharpening the jokes. There is hardly a joke in this book that is not pounded to death by a torrential rain of auctorial diarrhea, hardly a potentially witty one-liner that is not remorselessly extended to fill half a page. One is reminded of the misconception small children have that, if a joke is funny when you tell it once, it's twice as funny if you immediately repeat it, three times as funny if you ... and so on until the adults have no recourse except the coalhole.

Examples:

With a screeching wheel-spin they made off into the comforting darkness. It seemed fortunate that Frank had an even higher tolerance to man-made drugs than he did to the worst ravages of Watcher biotechnology. Frank's years as a gutter junkie finally began to pay off. His body had obtained more than just an immunity to just about every infectious disease known to man, plus a few that weren't; it had learned how to survive. Under a dosage which would have killed stone-dead a normal person, not to mention a tougher-than-average African bull-elephant, his battered system established some sort of equilibrium. The gale of fresher air, blowing headlong into his face, did its part too. After thirty minutes of Kate's high-speed driving Frank seemed to be making a tentative recovery.

In other words, thanks to his past drug-use and the gale in his face, Frank recovered in half an hour from a dose that would have killed an elephant. Another:

Not that their strategy, as it stood, was likely to win any prizes. If the French Foreign Legion started awarding Palme d'Ors [
sic
], in the category of "Best Foreign-Language Military Operation", then General Custer and the Seventh Cavalry were more likely to be getting a phone call and an all-expenses-paid trip to the Riviera.

Overwriting of this sort is forgivable if it occurs a few times in a humorous novel, but not if examples – often more than one – can be plucked from virtually every page.

That little parenthetical "
sic
" is worth noting, because another reason Thomas requires an editor is to clear up his grammar and especially his spelling. An example of the shoddy grammar is shown serendipitously in the first extract cited above:

It seemed fortunate that Frank had an even higher tolerance to man-made drugs than he did to the worst ravages of Watcher biotechnology.

What's meant, of course, is that it
was
fortunate that Frank
seemed
to have this tolerance. But the spelling errors are a greater concern, especially the proper nouns. It starts with the cover, which refers to "Rockwell" (perhaps the train of thought is that James Garner, of
Rockford Files
fame, starred in one of the tv movies about Roswell?), and goes on throughout the book: Richard "Millhouse" Nixon, the "Illuminanti", a "femme fatal", "hair-brained", "swotted" (for "swatted"), "grizzly" (for "grisly"), "least" (for "lest"), the "Templers" ... Two famously dead rock stars are referred to in a single phrase as "Janice" and "Jimmy". I did like the idea of the "spring role": alas, poor #46, I knew it well.

Some of these are repeated numerous times, so obviously it's not the typesetter to blame.

A third reason why Thomas needs an editor is to guide him towards the notion that, as well as the short-term jokes and one-liners, there should be the "macro-jokes" – to simplify, those jokes for which the foundations are laid several chapters before the punchlines are delivered. One could claim, somewhat desperately, that the book as a whole is such a macro-joke; but otherwise the text is marked by their absence, and thereby lacks the main device used by comic writers to keep the reader turning the pages. It's rather as if a thriller writer presented nothing but nonstop action passages without any linking rationale, without any build-up to each
coup de théâtre
; the pyrotechnics soon become pretty boring.

The shame of all this is that it is perfectly obvious from
Terror Firma
that Thomas does possess comic flair. This is not an unintelligent book. But the net effect of its amazing superfluity of flaws is to render all its attempts at shafts of wit less rapier than blunderbuss. To give a charitable estimate, it raised a smile perhaps half a dozen times in 437 pages. That's less than one smile per 70 pages. Not a high strike-rate.

—Infinity Plus