Eve's Alexandria

The Demon of Impatience

A Ripple from the Storm was not technically the next book in sequence for my Doris Lessing project (for which I am reading all her work in order of publication in a very leisurely fashion). After A Proper Marriage, the second book in the Children of Violence quintet, came Retreat to Innocence (1956) and after that the short story collection The Habit of Loving (1957), with the non-fiction Going Home (1957) in between.  Ripple, the third Children of Violence book, didn't appear until 1958, and so at my current reading rate (one Lessing book every 6 months) wouldn't have reached the top of the TBR pile until late 2011.  But since I have a pitiful memory, I decided it would be best to put aside the strictures of chronology temporarily and work at finishing the quintet before I loose the thread of their plot. 

Thus we find ourselves once more in early 1940s 'Zambesia' (read: Southern Rhodesia), just a few short weeks after Matty Knowell (nee Quest) has seperated from her first husband Douglas, and abandoned her three year old daughter Caroline, in order to pursue a life of Communist activism.   She is now a key member of the 'Group', a rag-tag bunch of like-minded misfits and agitators held together under the leadership of Jasmine, the ultra-organised administrator of every left-wing organisation in town, and Anton, the uncompromising German refugee we first met in A Proper Marriage.  An indifferent legal secretary by day, Martha spends all her free time in the evenings and at weekends pinging from one political gathering to the next - if it isn't Sympathisers for Russia or the Social Democratic party committee, it is long, exhausting meetings of the fledgling Communist Party of Zambesia.  She barely has time to eat or sleep, never mind remember that she has a family: Douglas and Caroline couldn't be further from her mind, and her parents barely register on the radar, despite Mrs Quest's increasingly pathetic attempts to control her daughter's behaviour.  If it weren't for the presence of RAF Comrades in the 'Group' we would hardly know there was also a world war going on.

Over the course of the novel's 300+ pages Martha vacilates once again between all-or-nothing enthusiasms and a deadly lethargy that threatens to overwhelm her.  Just like before her political activism is semi-detached to her personal passivity, so that while she expends great energy on the distribution of Communist publications in the 'Coloured quarter', she allows her personal life to simply happen around her. Both states are familiar to readers of Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage, to the extent that this third book feels at first like a repeat of the last one: same-old Matty, same old themes.  The Communism is more blatant, but the underlying cynicism is the same, same, same.  There is even another rushed, thoughtless marriage, this time to the anally retentive Anton, and if Martha isn't pregnant it is only out of sheer luck.

Even more than the previous two installments Ripple oozes moral pessimism and, more than that, a helpless, gut-wrenching hopelessness that never quite broke the surface in the early books.  At the end of A Proper Marriage Martha gave us the impression that she was making a break with her previously destructive behaviours, that she was abandoning husband and child to be more 'true to herself'.  But who are we kidding? This isn't Paulo Coehlo.  This is Doris Lessing.  And not only is it Doris Lessing, it is a story modelled so closely on Lessing's own life as to be in spitting distance of an autobiography.  Lessing knows that 22 year old girls do not rise to the surface of the life that is drowning them and gulp down clean air; on the contrary, they kick down, swim deeper and make the same mistakes again, only worse the second time round. 

It is worth remembering this: that, despite everything that has happened to her, Martha is still in her early twenties.  Her corruscating wit and chilly rationalism has yet to mature into anything approaching wisdom.  So that while Martha wants to be astute and cool and independent, she is still too confused and rebellious to understand how to be any of those things:

Martha said to herself: I must walk slowly and enjoy the moonlight.  She was conscious that the moment she left the group she felt as let down as if a physical support had been removed. 'I'm not alone enough - I should enjoy it when I am.' But she was almost running across the park.  As usual a demon of impatience was snapping at her heels, pushing her into the future.

The trajectory of A Ripple from the Storm is the slow, torturous death of this naive Martha, whose childish urgency is gradually worn down by the reality of the situation she finds herself in. That is, the political situation in Zambesia, which is absolutely stagnant, and the situation in her personal life, which is almost equally disastrous. 

The book gives the possibility of successful relationships between men and women very short shrift indeed, with the breakdown of not one but three marriages: that of Martha and Anton (doomed from the beginning) as well as the shot-gun marriage of Martha's friend Maisie and the thirty-year union of left-wing doyenne Mrs Van.  Lessing takes these marriages apart like a child pulling the legs of a spider, and shows no remorse.  She shows no remorse, I imagine, because she despises the ways in which (she perceives) relationships make less of people than they ought to be.  Women, she says, often construct themselves entirely in the light of their love affairs:

There is a type of woman who can never be, as they are likely to put it, 'themselves', with anyone but the man to whom they have permanently or not given their hearts.  If the man goes away there is left an empty space filled with shadows.  She mourns for the temporarily extinct perons she can only be with a man she loves; she mourns him who brought her 'self' to life.  She lives with the empty space at her side, people with the images of her own potentialities until the next man walks into the space, absorbs the shadows into himself, creating her, allowing her to be her 'self' - but a new self, since it is his conception which forms her.  Such a woman is recognizable often enough not by her solitude but the variety and number of her acquaintances and friends with whom she may be intimate but who, as far as she is concerned, do not 'really' know her. 

This both is and is not a picture of Martha.  I'm sure that, if accused thus, the character would heartily deny it, while at the same time accepting the truth of it with a self-deprecating grimace.  I'm sure of this because that is what Lessing herself does: as always, she is as harshly critical of the faults she recognises in herself as she is of those she recognises in others.  Martha's marriage to Anton allows her to examine another trait which she finds both distasteful and utterly compelling: the sexual dynamics of power.  Martha marries Anton partly because she wishes to be recognised as his closest and most loyal Comrade, his equal; only to discover that, against all expectations, he wants her to be his wife. She thought that politics could unsex her, but couldn't have been more wrong. He wants her to be less of a Communist that before; to be weak so that he can feel strong, even though this implies his own weakness.  He wants the part that of her that performs for men, and is dishonest in the performance.  A part of her, in other words, that she thought she had put to bed along with Douglas, Caroline and the sundowner parties:

She understood that what she had to do was to put her arms around him and apologize.  But she was fighting against the final collapse of her conception of him.  She knew that the moment she put her arms about him, to coax him out of silence, that creature in herself she despised would be born again: she would be capricious, charming, filial: to this compliant little girl Anton would be kind - and patronizing, as she repeated to herself over and over again, in a fierce resentment.  But this would be a mask for his being dependent on her; she would not be his child, but he hers. 

These are pretty solid clue, I think, as to Lessing's overall philosophy of relationships: best not to bother. If this weren't enough to prove it, Ripple also gives us Marjorie, married and pregnant to a low level beaurocrat, looking forward to a life of being second-rate, and Maisie, pregnant by her feckless boyfriend and then forced into a loveless marriage with another man for the sake of respectibility. 

Because Lessing abhors nostalgia - she calls it the 'old enemy' - there are few if any concessions to hope or the possiblity of change in A Ripple from the Storm.  Mr Maynard, the magistrate who feels increasingly frustrated with Martha's life-choices (not least, I imagine, because her life choices do not include Mr Maynard) and her views, gives voice to the worst thoughts of Lessing's colonial demons:

'Good God,' he exclaimed, really angry, speaking from his depths. 'What do you suppose you are going to change?  We happen to be in power, so we use power.  What is history? A record of misery, brutality and stupidity.  That's all.  That's all it ever will be. What does it matter who runs a country? It's always a bunch of knaves administering a pack of fools...'

Martha wants to believe in the possibility of change, but the reader observing her and the 'Group' with their petty conflicts and impotence, can't help but see any efforts they make to promote peace or equality as pathetic nonsense.  As pathetic as Martha's delusions of power during one of her exhausted collapses:

...her hands were not hers.  They seemed to have swelled.  Her hands were enormous, and she could not control their size... Everything she was had gone into her hands. ...she felt the tips of her fingers touch the vast balls of her thumbs as if girders had been laid across a ravine.  The world lay safe inot her hands.  Tenderness filled her.  She thought: Because of us, everyone will be saved.  She thought: I am holding the world safe, and no one will be hurt and unhappy ever again.

As the novel draws to its close Martha begins to understand this ridiculous impotency herself.  Mrs Van, the stalwart Social Democrat councillor campaigning for an 'African branch' of her party complains 'If things were done in a regular manner, these situations need not arise!' And Martha retorts: 'Regular? What's regular about anything that happens?  Don't you see that it's all a farce...everything.'  The novel ends in a blaze of pointlessness, representing the lowest ebb of Martha's emotional life so far:

We're all mad, she thought, trying to make it humorous... The fact is, I'm not a person at all, I'm nothing yet - perhaps I never will be.

Martha examined two very clear convictions that existed simultaneously in her mind.  One, it was inevitable that everything should have happened in exactly the way it had happened: no one could have behaved differently.  Two, that everything which had happened was unreal, grotesque and irrelevant... She was overwhelmed with futility.  She lay down on her bed, her back to Anton, who was already freshly analyzing the situation, and allowed herself to slide into sleep like a diver weighted with lead.

Reading A Ripple from the Storm is like suffocating; minute by minute it deprives you of air.  First, the passivity, the inevitability of making mistakes; and then the social injustice and the inhumanity of war, colonialism, racism; and then, worst of all, the revelation of the farcical, petty inconsequentiality of the people who are trying to put it all right.  It has all the bitterness of the first two novels, but squared.  Which is why Icouldn't really recommend this book to anyone thinking of embarking on a journey into Lessing.  Not only because it requires you to know (or at least recognise) Matty, but because it gives you almost no respite from the darkest night of the author's soul.  It is truly literature as confessional; a book that feels as much like a flogging as a story. I'm intrigued to see where the next book, Landlocked, can go from here.

But wait.  There is a reason - beyond morbid curiousity - why I keep coming back to this deeply troubling, horrifically wonderful writer.  In every novel Lessing leaves something unexpected behind her for me.  In this case it is the temporary switch in focus during the last third of the book from Martha to James Jones, one of the 'Group's' RAF Comrades.   His experience of Africa is, for me, classically Lessing, with its corrupt beauty and its 'tart' darkness.  No matter how thrifty of prose, economical and despairing the rest of the book is, there is still something like poetry to be had from this at least:

He settled himself, head back, motionless, moving his eyes only to take in the moon, the trees, the grass, the soft gleaming trash that littered the soil.  City boy from blackened, cold streets, he breathed the fresh tart air of the high-veld in and out of tainted lungs, fingered grains of heavy soil that clung to his fingers, frowned at the moonlight about him and thought: This is something like it.  Never see a sky like this at home.  The grass behind him was a solid wall, grown to its July strength, the sap no longer running, each stem taut and slippery as fine steel...

~~Victoria~~

In the Sea's Embrace

"One of the most exciting things about science," said Indian author and physics lecturer Vandana Singh in an interview last year, "is that it reveals the sub-text of the physical world. In other words surface reality isn’t all there is, the world is full of hidden stories, connections, patterns, and the scientific as well as the literary and psychological aspects of this multi-textured reality are, to me, fascinating. [...] Science is full of the most gorgeous literary metaphors!"

For Anasuya, the "explorer of mathematical countries" at the heart of Singh's most recent Aqueduct Press novella, Distances (2008), interaction with this multi-textured reality is a part of everyday life. Equations are poetry to her, each one with "its secret, inner space, its universe, nestled within", and mathematics is a sea in which she swims, literally and figuratively. She is a 'rider': she immerses herself in an amnion filled with a chemical fluid, in order to visualise calculations. She seeks to connect with, and map out, the "mountainous terrain of bizarre mathematical functions [...] branch points and branch cuts and hidden territories bearing algebraic surprises". She is, in fact, peculiarly suited to the task:

Her function was to lie in an amnion that had been specially constructed for her, with her neck-slits open. The sap that was exuded by the feathery organs inside her neck-slits and by the undersides of her fingernails and the tips of her breasts — the sap her people called vapasjal, that which is given back or returned — contained microscopic organelles the chemists at the temple called spiroforms. The spiroforms tasted the molecules in the mixture; as they interacted with the chemical stew of the amnion, a space blossomed in her mind, the most abstract made-world there could be: the sthanas itself - the solution-space of the mathematics.

It is the far future, and humanity has fanned out across the universe, adapting and diversifying to live in a myriad of new homes. Anasuya herself comes from a society of saltwater dwellers, a land of underwater caves and "seaweed forests", and has the physiology to match. But when we meet her she is a long way from home. She has travelled across a continent, to the desert City and its Temple of Mathematics; it is a place where the fleeting rainfall brings "the moist aroma of memory: the desert remembering water", and slipping into the amnion is the closest she can come to the sensations of home. When not exploring the mathematical space, she lives in a 'pentad' - a house and a relationship she shares with four other people - but nevertheless feels a quiet, deep isolation in her. The contrast between "soaring in multiple dimensions" in the sthanas and the stone-carved physicality of the "bone-dry City" is oppressive, and disorientating; outside the amnion, there are only distances.

Anasuya's cheerful pentad is reminiscent of some of Ursula Le Guin's fictional explorations of different forms of human intimacy (I'm thinking particularly of the collections Four Ways to Forgiveness and The Birthday of the World). But Singh also shares with Le Guin a broader fascination with the possibilities of what humanity can become, in different environments. Singh delights in variety and invention, in playing with language and enfolding even the most minor characters in generous warmth - as when Anasuya meets an off-world delegation for the first time, and immediately falls in love with their unexpected geometries:

Kzoric: largeness, roundness, loud voice, spherical geometries on the outside, including the enormous round bun of hair, but her gaze was prickly, sawtooth. Vishk: small, thin, skulking in the shadows, parabolic stoop of back. Tall Hiroq: long face, almost an ellipse, almost bilateral symmetry, long hands fumbling shyly with a neck-clasp, voice deep and rich, quick, shy blinks, glance a sine wave.

Singh has an ear for the unusual in her viewpoint characters' preferred metaphors; one of Anasuya's lovers, we're told, is "a spiral shell full of hidden surprises [...] she moved with a cloud's grace". Short though it is, the novella is full of the colour and texture that makes a world, and the joys and tragedies of its people as they seek to make connections with each other - as in the brief recounting of the past of Silaf, one of Anasuya's pentad, who fell in love with a gwi, a "winged reptilian creature" who fell from sky one day. Silaf nursed the gwi back to health, but when he attempted to return to the people he had lost, they no longer recognised him after his time away from them, and instead of accepting him they tore him apart. Silaf was found "wandering the streets, crying in the harsh tongue of the gwi, holding a bag of her lover's bones, all polished-white", and Anasuya's group took her in.

The off-world visitors bring with them a new mathematical problem, one that holds out the alluring possibility of new art to be made with numbers, and a new reality to explore - something that might allow humanity to unite once more across the distances between the stars. The emotional and thematic parallels with Anasuya's separation from her home and thus her identity are clear, but not overplayed. Like Anasuya's experiences within the sthanas, Distances is both immersive and alienating: an elegant story of an outsider making a place for herself, and both gaining and losing something in the process.

Less successful, I think, is Singh's earlier novella for Aqueduct, Of Love and Other Monsters (2007). Set in India and the US, it is an enjoyable and well-written story, which deals with Singh's touchstone themes of isolation and belonging (and opens with a lovely passage about waves on a beach that melds descriptive prose, pathetic fallacy and physics very neatly). But next to Distances it feels a little slight.

Structurally, Of Love and Other Monsters is a picaresque. It takes its narrator, a young man named Arun, from reborn, curious innocence - he wakens to awareness as he is rescued from a mysterious fire, without identity or memory of what came before - to lonely, bittersweet experience.

Arun is another outsider, although how much of one doesn't become clear until part way through the novella. Like Anasuya, Arun feels the pain of distance: an isolation from the world around him that he cannot quite put a name to, despite the loving home created for him by his rescuer Janani. He is constantly seeking to make connections with those around him, and here he has an advantage over Anasuya, because he can dip into the subjectivities of the people around him, learning to know them through their thoughts and impulses:

Both my mind and my body responded to the needs of such men and women around me; sometimes I would get aroused simply walking down the street, feeling the brush of their minds like feathers on my skin.

He finds that he can draw them into a sort of merged consciousness that he terms 'meta-minds', a process he likens to weaving ("a kind of net [...] not a tapestry, I was never that skilled - but a jumble of kitting wool, such as a kitten might do"). He practices "what I considered to be my art" in the local market:

here the vendors squatted on the ground before their baskets of gourds, peppers, eggplants, and onions, shouting, "Rob me! Loot me! Only three rupees a kilo!" I grew to appreciate the sweaty housewives with their glinting eyes, their bright sarees hitched up in readiness for battle as they began insulting the produce. Pride, honour and desire amidst the tottering, shining piles of luscious fruits and vegetables - how could I resist?

So accustomed is Arun to sharing others' secrets and desires - their self-images and their relationship to their bodies - that he slides with transgressive ease between categories, challenging binaries of sexuality and gender as he gives free expression to all the aspects of his nature. "I looked and dressed like a man," he notes, "but I did not understand social conventions about what it meant to be a man or a woman", and later he describes himself as "not a man or a woman, not a human or an alien". Through reading - a mixture, he tells us, of "lurid Hindi science fiction" and "paperback English romances" - Arun is able to push the boundaries of his empathy much further, at the same time as helping him to recognise additional dimensions of isolation:

Writing - whether English or Hindi or computer code - was the key that opened doors to other minds, other lands. Like a monk on leave from the monastery, I was agape with wonder. For the first time I realised that there were many ways to be a foreigner; losing one's memory, being poor, being illiterate, were just some of them.

Of course, he is not the only one with such abilities, and while Janani does her best to protect him from the dangerous glamour of the more experienced mind-weaver Rahul Moghe, Arun cannot help but feel drawn to the one person who truly understands what he feels. His sense of alienation only intensifies when he leaves India for the US, to work in the booming software industry. He is discomforted by its "abnormally clean streets so strangely empty of people or animals" (the expectation of animals, here, recalls Singh's own descriptions of her childhood), and finds the Indians he meets there "liv[ing] in a time-warp", wedded to traditions that no longer exist in India. But in Boston there is a measure of peace; in a nice touch, Arun observes that he is only one immigrant among many, albeit more unusual than most.

The desire to belong, to achieve a more perfect union, never leaves him, however. He loves, and loses, and cannot quite shake Rahul Moghe, nemesis and mirror image. Even when the destructive, vindictive aspect of Moghe's nature becomes unavoidable, Arun finds it difficult to reject him completely, because Moghe is an anchor for Arun's lost identity, however harmful:

[H]e was my own kind. Between our minds there were no barriers. With him I could begin to learn the lexicon of my lost language.

Distances is the more satisfying work, then, but both are recommended.

Two of Singh's short stories are also available online, at Strange Horizons: 'Three Tales from Sky River' and 'Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra'. For more on the Conversation Pieces series, see my review of the Eleanor Arnason short story collection Ordinary People, and my comments on Lesley Hall's biography of Naomi Mitchison, part of a longer piece on the author.

~~Nic

"I was never on the moon."

I'm a sick woman, a madwoman, a ball-breaker, a man-eater; I don't consume men gracefully with my fire-like red hair or my poisoned kiss; I crack their joints with these filthy ghoul's claws and standing on one foot like a de-clawed cat, rake at your feeble efforts to save yourselves with my taloned hinder feet: my matted hair, my filthy skin, my big flat plaques of green bloody teeth. I don't think my body would sell anything. I don't think I would be good to look at.

My recent stint of reading and writing about US feminist author and academic Joanna Russ (see also here and here) comes to an end, for now, with her best known work of fiction, The Female Man (1975). I read it some time ago, but I've been putting off posting on it - in part, I must confess, because I have been struggling with how to approach it. It is a searing read, emotionally and intellectually demanding, and any attempt to blog about it inevitably feels... if not quite trivialising, precisely, then certainly a long way from encompassing the whole. Also, every time I start typing I flash back to this beautifully snarky passage,

You will notice that even my diction is becoming feminine, thus revealing my true nature; I am not saying "Damn" any more, or "Blast"; I am putting in lots of qualifiers like "rather," I am writing in these breathless little feminine tags, she threw herself down on the bed, I have no structure (she thought), my thoughts seep out shapelessly like menstrual fluid, it is all very female and deep and full of essences, it is very primitive and full of "and's," it is called "run-on sentences."

Very swampy in my mind. Very rotten and badly off. I am a woman. I am a woman with a woman's brain. I am a woman with a woman's sickness. I am a woman with the wraps off, bald as an adder, God help me and you.

... and reflect, ruefully, on how often I fall back on crutch words like 'rather' and 'somewhat', myself. I tell myself I'm just being arch; but can I avoid them, for the length of one post?

The other obstacle to writing about the book is the frequency with which it shifts registers, and the consequent impossibility of doing justice to - indeed, of getting a handle on - all its narrative modes. As in the examples quoted above, long passages are told in a first-person confessional style, which at times becomes full-on stream-of-consciousness. These confessionals come from several different voices. The novel centres on four women - Joanna, Jeannine, Janet and Jael - who, we eventually discover, are versions of the same person. This produces a third source of difficulty: it is rarely announced, directly, who the 'I' of any given passage is, so the reader must piece together from tone and reference who is speaking. In some cases, of course, not knowing is the point; their experiences, as women, are universal, or universalised in the telling.

The four Js grew up on parallel worlds, but are brought together in the course of the story, by Jael, to experience, and learn from, each others' lives. The bulk of the close-in first-person narration falls to Joanna - an unhappy academic on what seems to be our own world, in the 1970s - and, later on, to Jael, a paragon of rage from a world where the battle of the sexes has been brutally, bloodily literal for decades.

Joanna is the 'female man' of the title. Near the start of the novel she tells us that, when the events of the story began, she "had just changed into a man", although her "body and soul were exactly the same". Later, she explains what this means: she had realised that, in a man's world, the only way to play, to survive, was to remake herself and adopt masculine tactics:

I'll tell you how I turned into a man.

First I had to turn into a woman.

For a long time I had been neuter, not a woman at all but One Of The Boys, because if you walk into a gathering of men, professionally or otherwise, you might as well be wearing a sandwich board that says: LOOK! I HAVE TITS!

And to be recognised as a woman is to be dismissed, out of hand:

To be female is to be mirror and honeypot, servant and judge, the terrible Rhadamanthus for whom he must perform but whose judgment is not human and whose services are at anyone's command, the vagina dentata and the stuffed teddy-bear he gets if he passes the test. This is until you're forty-five, ladies, after which you vanish into thin air like the smile of the Cheshire cat, leaving behind only a disgusting grossness and a subtle poison that automatically infects every man under twenty-one.

As she plays host to Janet, larger-than-life visitor from the women-only planet of Whileaway (a place first seen in Russ' famous short story of first contact, 'When It Changed'), Joanna grows from mortified mediator to forthright feminist. Coming from a world without men, Janet functions as a beginner's guide to the network of assumptions and restrictions that is the patriarchy, cursed as she is with the conviction that others will treat as a human being rather than - as the quotation goes - a doormat or a prostitute. Initially, Joanna is alarmed by her unwanted guest's loud voice and unseemly (because unfeminine) behaviour; she chides and chivvies Janet into wearing more feminine clothes and learning to do as she is told ('sit down', 'we don't do that', 'you must', etc.). Then Joanna takes her to a cocktail party, and it all goes about as well as you might expect, particularly when Janet starts being subjected to harassment (the 'I' here is Joanna):

It's the host, drunk enough not to care.
Uh-oh. Be ladylike.
[Janet] showed him all her teeth. He saw a smile.
"You're beautiful, honey."
"Thank you. I go now." (good for her)
"Nah!" and he took us by the wrist. "Nah, you're not going."
"Let me go," said Janet.
Say it loud. Somebody will come to rescue you.
Can't I rescue myself?
No.
Why not?
All this time he was nuzzling her ear and I was showing my distaste by shrinking terrified into a corner, one eye on the party. Everyone seemed amused.

Joanna, looking back on the scene with a more cynical eye, notes drily how Janet fails to follow the script, imagined as a book in said man's possession, which explains how women will always back down, and give in (and here the narrative voice switches back and forth between Joanna's observation and extracts from the 'text' of the book). Janet does everything women are trained by society not to do: she makes no attempt to cushion her refusal, ignores the flattery, is unmoved by the suggestion that she's a prude, and not cowed by his increasingly violent insults - above all she fails to be blushingly polite, at every step of the way, to the man whose attention she never wanted in the first place and whose contempt only becomes more obvious the longer she subverts the script. Harpy. Ball-breaker. Uppity. Ugly bitch.

When the intrusive host won't shut up, Janet shrugs and knocks him to the ground. Her life has given her tools that Joanna and her contemporaries do not have, or would never contemplate developing in the first place; it simply isn't done for a woman to stand up for herself in this way. This isn't to say Whileaway is presented as a utopia; the way of life is heavily functionalist ("Whileawayans work all the time. They work. And they work. And they work"). It has rigid social structures of its own which, inevitably, means that some do not fit in, and are alienated. Janet, for one, expresses feelings of superfluity and constriction; she relishes the change of scene of travelling to other worlds, even if she has been sent on the mission precisely because she is not necessary to her society. As Gwyneth Jones notes in her essay 'In the Chinks of the World Machine: Sarah Lefanu on Feminist SF', the version of Whileaway we see in The Female Man is a satire of the all-women separatist worlds of 1970s feminist SF - as opposed to that in 'When It Changed', where it is a serious exploration of an environment in which women are not just people, but the people. In 'When It Changed', the women set the agenda, they are the yardstick against which humanity is measured; in The Female Man, they are a reaction, shaped to the argument being made.

Janet is a chaotic, liberating force for both Joanna and Jeannine; she is bemused by the social niceties - which boil down to the overriding dictat that women be nice - that she encounters in the worlds parallel to her own. The other worlds, in turn, are bemused by her: but how can women live without men? In another switch of narrative register, we're presented with the transcript from Janet's appearance on a chat show, in which the (male) interviewer struggles manfully with the notion that the women of Whileaway could possibly be happy without the almighty penis company of men:

MC: Don't you want men to return to Whileaway, Miss Evason?

JE: Why?

MC: One sex is half a species, Miss Evason. I am quoting (and he cited a famous anthropologist). Do you want to banish sex from Whileaway?

JE (with massive dignity and complete naturalness): Huh?

MC: I said: Do you want to banish sex from Whileaway? Sex, family, love, erotic attraction - call it what you like - we all know that your people are competent and intelligent individuals, but do you think that's enough? Surely you have the intellectual knowledge of biology in other species to know what I'm talking about.

JE: I'm married. I have two children. What the devil do you mean?

In some ways - if not nearly enough - things have changed since The Female Man was published; episodes such as the cocktail party or Janet's TV interview are, in any case, painted with the exaggeration-for-effect that its science fictional elements allow. Most women today, at least in this country, are much less likely to encounter such overt hostility at a social gathering. (It's hardly unknown, though.) But the script remains familiar; even today, there can be few women who haven't encountered the men who, when ignored or given a summary brush-off on the street or in a bar, turn nasty because pushing button A didn't produce outcome B - or, in the case of the "Smile, love!" types, because they only ever wanted to command your attention and one way is as good as any other (what else, after all, could a woman have to think about anyway?).

Likewise, how often do we hear the half-joking, half-serious question when the topic of gay marriage arises: so which of you is the man, eh? Who's the husband, and who's the wife? Because 'traditional' marriage is definitely not about immutable, unequal gender roles, oh no. One character recalls to Janet how she was told - as a rebellious teenage girl whose skill at maths and failure perform femininity led to fears that she might become (gasp) a lesbian - that,

I must understand that femininity was a Good Thing, and although men's and women's functions in society were different, they had equal dignity. Separate but equal, right? Men make the decisions and women make the dinners.

The Female Man is polemic, not realism; it is an argument, an exhilarating salvo. Therein lies its continuing value - perhaps more than ever in a time when explicit misogyny may be frowned upon in many (or even most) quarters, but the implicit expectations of patriarchy remain operative, in near-silence. (See also: Mad Men.) Through Joanna, Russ calls out the party host's behaviour for what it is - not flattery, but a power play, a performance - and they remind women that we don't have to stick to the script. We don't have to smile and politely demur - to perform pretty, passive femininity - while we're yelling inside. Russ also, crucially, reminds us of the broader narrative that frames and necessitates such performances. A narrative that is still very much with us, as when - for example - so much of the commentary surrounding a high-profile, very accomplished woman's wedding takes it for granted that said wedding is the most important day of her life (and not, of course, of the groom's). (Meanwhile, unmarried women must be sponging off the state.) Elsewhere, Russ has Joanna mock the equally backhanded mythologising of motherhood: "This is the most important job in the world. That's why they don't pay you for it."

The embodiment of this fluffier (and more insidious) side of sexism - and the ways in which some women buy into, enforce, and perpetuate it - is Jeannine, a sheltered, infantilised flake from an alternative 20th-century US in which the Great Depression rumbles on. For much of the novel, Jeannine does not self-present; instead, we only see her through the eyes of the other Js, or third-person narration, or else through context-stripped transcripts/playscripts of her conversations:

JEANNINE: Mrs. Robert Poirier. Jeannine Dadier-Poirier. Ha ha! He's good-looking. Cal – Cal is - well! Still, Cal is sweet. Poor, but sweet. I wouldn't give up Cal for anything. I enjoy being a girl, don't you? I wouldn't be a man for anything; I think they have such a hard time of it. I like being admired. I like being a girl. I wouldn't be a man for anything. Not for anything.

ME: Has anyone proposed the choice to you lately?

Jeannine finally gets a voice of her own when she begins to find independence, a selfhood that exists above and beyond the femininity she  is expected by her family, and society, to perform - that is, to be well-groomed and sweet-tempered at all times, so that she can make the transition from dutiful daughter to dutiful wife with ease. Jeannine is what a proper woman should be, like the middle-class ideals of the 1950s never went out of fashion. Joanna notes the mindset and behaviour that must be cultivated:

all I did was
dress for The Man
smile for The Man
talk wittily to The Man
sympathize with The Man
flatter The Man
understand The Man
defer to The Man
entertain The Man
keep The Man
live for The Man.

Of all the Js, Jeannine stuggles the most with what other women bring into her life. She is repulsed by a brief trip to Whileaway, where she feels "out of place", putting her hands over her ears and shutting her eyes and telling herself "I'm not here" so that she doesn't have to see the other women there - "big eyes, big breasts, big shoulders, thick lips, all that grossness", the female form without the male gaze to validate its attractiveness.

The polemic of The Female Man is at its most forceful, meanwhile, in Jael. If Jeannine's storyline explores familial pressures on women, Joanna's is concerned with their social and professional handicaps, and Janet shows us the opprobrium attracted by women who attempt to disregard men in their lives, Jael's role in the story is all about violence. She reflects on the first time she heard about a woman she knew being raped, and saw how it "creates a luminous and beautiful tableau in people's minds" of right and wrong and shame. "I slowly came to understand," she says, "that I was face to face with one of those shadowy feminine disasters, like pregnancy, like disease, like weakness; she was not only the victim of the act but in some strange way its perpetrator; somehow she had attracted the lightning that struck her out of a clear sky". Good girls don't get raped; she shouldn't have worn that, she shouldn't have walked there, she must have provoked him.

But Jael does not only remember violence; she also, discomfortingly, inflicts it, and revels in it. "I don't threaten. I don't play," she tells us, before she "gaily" murders a would-be rapist. Far from crying self-defence, however, in response to the horror of the other Js she lays claim, with pride, to her transgressive, unfeminine aggression: "'I don't give a damn whether it was necessary or not [...] I liked it.'" Her first-person narration is pure fury - a sharp, precise statement of intent that has absolutely no patience left with which to soften the blows of its bitten-off syllables:

For every drop of blood shed there is restitution made; with every truthful reflection in the eyes of a dying man I get back a little of my soul; with every gasp of horrified comprehension I come a little more into the light. See? It's me!

I am the force that is ripping out your guts; I, I, I, the hatred twisting your arm; I, I, I, the fury who has just put a bullet into your side. It is I who cause this pain, not you. It is I who am doing it to you, not you. It is I who will be alive tomorrow, not you. Do you know? Can you guess? Are you catching on? It is I, who you will not admit exists. [...]

I, I, I. Repeat it like magic. That is not me. I am not that. Luther crying out in the choir like one possessed: NON SUM, NON SUM, NON SUM!

More than any of the other main characters, too, Jael's narrative explores how the nominal beneficiaries of patriarchal social organisation convince themselves that they are doing the right thing, and how much they define themselves in opposition to women, struggling with their own self-image when their unexamined dominance over the 'fairer sex'  - the dominance on which their selfhood and their place in masculine society depends - is challenged. (There is, of course, no room for feminist men in Jael's vision of the world.) Why are feminists so angry? This, she explains, is why: that they are expected to cultivate helplessness for the sake of some men's fragile egos, and to enjoy it:

Of course you don't want me to be stupid, bless you! you only want to make sure you're intelligent. You don't want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be gratefully aware of my dependency. You don't want me to despise myself; you only want to ensure the flattering deference to you that you consider a spontaneous tribute to your natural qualities. [...] On top of it all, you sincerely require me to be happy; you are naively puzzled that I should be so wretched and so full of venom in this best of all possible worlds.

In many ways, The Female Man is easy neither to read nor to like. It is spiky and difficult and uncomfortable, calculated to satirise and inspire anger - to demolish more than to build. But it is never less than urgently compelling, and, after all the enraging things its characters experience and recount, its conclusion is even uplifting - or, more accurately, cathartic:

Live merrily, little daughter-book, even if I can't and we can't; recite yourself to all who will listen; stay hopeful and wise. Wash your face and take your place without a fuss in the Library of Congress, for all books end up there eventually, both little and big. Do not complain when at last you become quaint and old-fashioned, when you grow as outworn as the crinolines of a generation ago and are classed with Spicy Western Stories, Elsie Dinsmore, and The Son of the Sheik; do not mutter angrily to yourself when young persons read you to hrooch and hrch and guffaw, wondering what the dickens you were all about. Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers' laps and punch the readers' noses.

Rejoice, little book!

For on that day, we will be free.

~~Nic

Magical Mafia

Here's a short post for a Sunday afternoon: a review I wrote for SFX #198, of Holly Black's very enjoyable White Cat. And while I'm here, another of my reviews went up on their site last month, ahead of its appearance in the print version (now on sale).

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Spiderwick Chronicles co-creator Holly Black's new book doesn't lack for ambition. It's a mob saga, a boarding school caper, a mystery and an allegory for the immigrant experience in the US. All this in 300 pages and the pace never once flags. 
 
The story begins with our narrator, Cassel, on his school's roof in the middle of the night, with no idea of how he got there or how to get down. All he remembers is dreaming about a white cat. Off the roof, out of the school and back in the never-loving arms of his dysfunctional family, Cassel discovers there's a lot he has no idea about – including the things he does remember. 
 
The inventive world-building shines as each twist of the plot drags Cassel deeper into an underground of black market magic, and the powerful families who have controlled it since 'working' was outlawed in 1929. It's not a unique idea, but it's sketched with nuanced economy and lashings of vivid secondary characters from many walks of life. 
 
Cassel himself is a prickly but engaging outsider, both at home - as the only non-'worker' in his family - and as a poor kid in a school for the rich. A self-confessed liar from a dynasty of con artists, he has a fun approach to problem-solving and a habit of hiding his true self. Black combines the high concept with the everyday to great effect, using the magic-infested waters of Cassel's life to explore what is, for some, the darker side of growing up: a nascent awareness of being hemmed in by adults who don't always tell the truth, and may not have your best interests at heart. But she counters that with the possibility of learning to trust - and to form true, lasting friendships. Despite such weighty themes, the pages fly by. 

~~Nic