Singer From The Sea (Paperback)

The tantalising suggestions can be a bit too much as this book begins in a 'Swiss Chalet School' mode and then slips into 'Little Women' concerns. There's a world at stake but Genevieve worries about curtains and servants.

Luckily the revelation is a good one and by the end changes rush in on the reader. There's a teaser chapter at the start which is guarranteed to hook you. So trust me the payoff is worth enduring all the hockey sticks for.

Now, having come to Tepper's defense, I'm going to speak of what bothers me most about her. And what bothers me most about Tepper is her anti-technological stance; her notion that Homo Faber, the direct descendent of Homo Habilis the Tinkerer, is somehow always intrinsically, genetically criminal, just bound to be up to no good. In book after book of Tepper's we are invited to behold the disastrous consequences of human meddling; in no book of hers do we ever receive much of a suggestion that such meddling may sometimes turn out WELL--that it may result in a cathedral, a symphony, a cure for polio or an unusually nifty flower display. No, Tepper implies, human ingenuity is not wanted in this universe: down with it.

Worse yet, this proscription against too much ingenuity, too much human cleverness, seems to come down hardest upon her sex and mine. Tepper's books treat eloquently of the power imbalance btween the sexes and the disastrous consequences which often proceed from THAT, but it's been years since she's painted the picture of a woman accepting power instead of renouncing it. In _Singer from the Sea_ Tepper has a great deal of fun at the expense of cultural conventions which prescribe resignation and acquiescence (not initiative and problem-solving) on the part of women. But, in the end, in effect, she herself preaches the same thing. Nineteenth-century conduct books used chillingly to recommend that women be "wise for self-renunciation and not for self-development": in other words they advised women only to USE power in the service of LOSING power. The female lead of _Singer from the Sea_, Genevieve Marchioness of Wantresse, does just that: she evinces ability, but only in the cause of service to a higher power; isn't that precisely what women have all to often been required to do vis-a-vis men? Why should it be any different when the recipient of female sacrifice is a World Spirit instead of a husband? And the World Spirit of Genevieve's planet requires of her the greatest abjection; at the end of the book she renounces meddling, technology--the use of her hands. In doing so, she becomes akin to all the mutilated maidens in the gorier fairytales--the ones who walk out into the world, meet with events which diminish them terribly, and who must thereafter either outclever or cope with their diminishment--except that Genevieve wishes her disempowerment upon HERSELF (to say nothing of her descendants.)

THAT is appalling. And it's a sacrifice required only of the female--one of Genevieve's (male) sidekicks, Jeorfy Bottoms, escapes his own entrapment by learning about machines and about the technology which will allow him to assume some degree of control over his circumstances, while Genevieve is made to sink back into the realm of the undifferentiated. Mercedes Lackey's retelling of a fairly grim fairytale, _The Black Swan_, a book with an argumentative thrust similar to that of _Singer from the Sea_, DEMANDS of its female protagonist that she learn how to interfere, to accomplish, to achieve, to DO. Lackey's heroine accedes to power, she does not deny it: she strengthens her hands instead of (metaphorically) cutting them off. The whole point of _The Black Swan_ is that Odile von Rothbart can do things with hands that she can't do with wings; the whole point of _Singer form the Sea_ is that Genevieve would be better off with flippers. The husband, he's the best thing in the book. By far. To the cynical he might appear to be a bit infatuated and biddable but verily, I say unto you, appearances are frequently deceitful. Aufors Leys, male lead of _Singer from the Sea_, has gonads of steel. His powers of endurance are superlative, his resourcefulness is amazing, and his intentness on getting what he wants gives rise to awe. (Of course, that last characteristic is okay since he's a guy.) Aufors Leys displays syptoms only too infrequently to be met with among the general run of science fiction males--he shows signs of being a REAL HERO. Admittedly, he's a romantic hero: his quest is to find out what's up with his woman. THIS, as my mother used to say, is the kind of man you marry. The sad thing is, though, that his character is ineluctably weakened toward the novel's end, just as his wife Genevieve is "winning toward the goal" of her apothesis. Exactly why should that be? Nothing in the plot necessitates it. For my part I can't escape the feeling that, just as it's somehow ACTUALLY not all right for women in the world described by _Singer from the Sea_ to learn to cope with machinery, it's also somehow not all right for Genevieve to end up being able to do something that her husband can't.

All the same (as I said before) Tepper writes well, constructs worlds like an expert, handles a plot line (or several) like a pro. Hence this diatribe. _Singer from the Sea_ is, like all her books, an eloquent testimonial to her authorial powers. It's because Tepper's books are so consistently so GOOD that it troubles me when they appear to be implying Very Bad Things--that's all. I don't think we NEED another renunciation story, either as women or as men. The kind of transformation story in which the protagonist learns to endure pain and to accept fate has been WRITTEN already--by the Brothers Grimm and by everybody else. As I see it, we need more transformation stories in which the transformed characters end up with REALLY COOL POWERS which enable them to do INCREDIBLY INTERESTING THINGS. Anything less, as Queen Mu tells us, is BORING. Why is it that books like _Singer from the Sea_, with such promising sources of interest at their command, preach acquiescence in dullness, in non-differentiation, at the last? Why should we be advised, either as women or as men, to live our lives out underwater?