Divine Endurance [Mass Market Paperback]

Gwyneth Jones (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1989

The Cat - intelligent, elegant and heartless - and her loving companion Cho together go in search of the race who had left them alone. Cho believes she would be able to put an end to the world's problems. Divine Endurance had promised her that. And it is true: Cho has the power to grant every wish of the human heart. In the Peninsula, Cho and Divine Endurance discover a land of intricate beauty, but it is also a land riddled with corruption, where a desperate struggle is in progress between the people and the indifferent power of their Rulers. Everywhere death creeps in like the tide. And sometimes every wish of the human heart doesn't always work out ...

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Orphaned princess Chosen Among the BeautifulCho, for shorthas grown up in isolation, tended by machines, with only the cat Divine Endurance as a companion. When an earthquake wrecks the palace, the two leave in search of Cho's long-lost brother. What they find beyond the desert is a populous, contentious, future Southeast Asia under the thumb of the distant Rulers. Further divisions among princes, clans, gangsters and revolutionaries keep the pot astir. Beyond normal society, there are also the outcasts, among them the independent, the eccentric and barren women. Divine Endurance seeks the Rulers but Cho moves in the other direction, falling in love with Derveet, the rebel leader. Not entirely of a piece, this is still an agreeably offbeat combination of fairy tale, travelogue and political novel.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Gwyneth Jones lives in Brighton with her husband and son. She won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for BOLD AS LOVE; CASTLES MADE OF SAND was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Award and MIDNIGHT LAMP is shortlisted for the Clarke and British SF Awards. She is the previous winner of the James Tiptree Memorial Award and two World Fantasy Awards; four of her previous books have been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: Tom Doherty Assoc Llc (April 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812542819
• ISBN-13: 978-0812542813
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 4.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,122,428 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gwyneth Jones, born in Manchester UK, 14th February 1952, is the author of many novels for teenagers, fantasy, horror and thrillers, using the name Ann Halam, and several highly regarded sf and fantasy novels for adults. Her critical essays and reviews are collected in Deconstructing The Starships, 1999 and Imagination/Space 2009. Among other honours she's won two World Fantasy awards, the Children of the Night award, the Philip K Dick award, the BSFA award and the Pilgrim award for Science Fiction criticism. Several of her novels have been nominated for the Arthur C Clarke award, the latest being Spirit, 2009; she won the award for Bold As Love in 2002. She lives in Brighton, UK, with her husband and son, some goldfish and two cats called Ginger and Milo; likes old movies, practices yoga & has done some extreme tourism in her time. Hobbies include gardening and cooking, and playing with her websites.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Enchanted World of "Divine Endurance", December 13, 2002

By 

Michele French (Chico, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Divine Endurance (Mass Market 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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent and lyrical post-apocalyptic novel, August 27, 2005

By 

frumiousb "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Divine endurance (Hardcover)

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.

4.0 out of 5 stars A bleak novel about the end of the world *after* the end of the world, January 29, 2012

By 

L. - See all my reviews

This review is from: Divine Endurance (Paperback)

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.