Divine Endurance [Paperback]

I read this book over 10 years ago and the memory of its beauty still haunts me. The prose was so elegant and so precise that I could taste, smell and feel the sensations being described on paper. The world of a post-nuclear holocaust oppressed by a rigid social and political structure should have been ugly and unpleasant, but quite the opposite--it was enchanting and thrilling.

Three scenes from the book I remember particularly: the richly clad prince wandering among blossoms of ylang-ylang (altho' it's been so long since I read this it may have been jasmine); an erotic encounter between the bandit Derweet (a beautiful woman disguised as a handsome man) and his/her computer-generated servant, the lovely child, Cho ( I felt as tho' I, too, were being ravished); the slipping, sliding journey that Cho takes in search of her brother down the mountains of southeast China that have been melted into glass by nuclear blasts. Nor can I forget the creature that lends her name to the book as its title, "Divine Endurance," the small, brown, wise, tough-talking little cat that accompanies Cho in her travels.

Gwyneth Jones has a subtle imagination and a deep understanding of human nature. You experience this beautiful book rather than merely reading it.

By the time that Chosen Among the Beautiful (Cho) makes her way from the broken palace to the great lake, we are clear about a few things. Neither she or her cat, Divine Endurance, are what they seem and this is not your typical science fiction/fantasy novel.

This is my second book by Gwyneth Jones. I decided to pick up Divine Endurance after being extremely impressed with Bold As Love. Sadly little known in the US, Jones is an award-winning British science fiction and fantasy author. She is justly famed for her inventiveness and the quality of her prose. Divine Endurance was her first novel.

This post-apocalyptic Indonesia is an amazing and real place-- full of myths and shattered shards of society. Cho, her brother Worthy to Be Beloved, and the mysterious Divine Endurance are relics from the disasterous past-- angel dolls which act as a catalyst for change in the struggling world.

If Divine Endurance has a flaw as a novel, it is largely that the world and the characters are better developed than the plot. It reminded me in many ways of The Etched City, by K.J. Bishop, although I think that the Jones book is ultimately more successful.

If you are looking for something unusual and are a fan of dystopic or post-apocalypse science fiction (China Mieville, Sean McMullen) then I suggest that you give Divine Endurance a try. Certainly if you are a fan of any kind of intelligent science fiction or fantasy, then you should become familiar with Gwyneth Jones.

Divine Endurance, by Gwyneth Jones (first published 1987)

Bottom line: A painful, sad meditation on what it would mean for humanity to be given what it needs--not what it thinks it needs--to be entirely at peace.

Trigger warnings: Rape implied (in the past, not of a main character), shaming of barrenness, forced castration, prostitution out of need and social ostracism, child slavery, drug abuse, death of main characters, loss of a significant other, racism with resulting persecution and genocide, kidnapping, sex with a partner who appears to be a minor (looks 15 years old but is actually much older)

How does it treat women/same-sex relationships? In the novel's post-apocalyptic society, women are the governing heads of society, ruling in seclusion. Men have no power in government and carry out day-to-day tasks, look pretty, and practice the arts. Castrated men, called boys, take care of menial tasks. Neither boys nor men are treated poorly, but it's clear they're lower on the social totem pole than women. F/m sex is controlled by the governing women. Young women have sex with assigned partners when they come of age. If they bear children, they're accepted into the governing body of women; if not, they're considered failed women and ostracized. Tensions between the genders are still very strong and in many ways identical to those of the present day, except in reverse. Same-sex love seems to be accepted and not frowned on, whereas different-sex (sexual romantic) love seems to be taboo, beyond the sexual encounters prescribed by the government.

Does it have explicit sex scenes?: It has non-explicit sex scenes, in which f/f couples initiate sex and then fade to black.

Would I read it again? Yes. It's fragile, sad, and horribly bleak, but it also has a thread of hope in it.

Would I publish it? Yes. I'd ask for Jones to clarify a few passages where I wasn't certain which characters were doing what.

This is an enormously sad book. In the post-apocalyptic future, only a small portion of humanity clings to life and civilization (the novel is set in a far-future version of the mainland and island countries bordering on the South China Sea). Divine Endurance, a bio-engineered cat android, and Cho (short for Chosen Among the Beautiful), the last of a line of androids/gynoids designed specifically to make people happy (no matter what the cost), leave the dead factory in which Divine Endurance raised Cho and travel out into the dying world of human beings, searching for Cho's brother, Wo (Worthy to Be Beloved). Divine Endurance and Cho discover that the last of humanity is on the edge of war with itself--and how can you make so many hurting, despairing, yet desperate to survive people happy? Cho imprints on Darveet, the last survivor of a royal household that once rebelled against the matriarchal government, taking Darveet as 'her person,' the one particular person she will try hardest to make happy. As a barren, 'failed' woman, someone who simultaneously yearns to be part of the women's secretive government and who sees fatal flaws in it, and as a mixed-race woman, half of the genetically-mutated hill outcasts and half of the genetically-managed royal blood, Darveet's desires are more than complicated and less than definitive. Together, she and Cho meet other women (and men) who strive hard to hope and work for their world's survival.

For me, as someone who lives with depression, this book captured the hopelessness that comes with depression, but on a civilization-wide scale--that sense of what does it all come down to? Why not just give up and let it be over? Why does it all hurt so much, for so little? It's a rough read, but a poetic one, with an ending that doesn't shy away from the book's themes but which didn't crush me with its bleakness, either. If you're sad and need catharsis and a sense that someone understands how deep and bad it can be to feel as though everything you could ever do is futile, this is a good book for that; if you're sad and need something to take your mind off of the fact, this isn't a good book for *that.*

It's worth reading. I've never read a novel about the slow end of the world that might follow the fast end of the world of a global apocalypse--the end of the world that would still take hundreds of years to sputter out, with human beings trying until the last minutes of the species to keep going.