Customer Reviews

The Falling Woman

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4 star:		(4)
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2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This intriguing novel won the 1987 Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of the year. This is actually more of a psychological fantasy rather than a work of classical science fiction, although there are clearly science fiction elements present. A female archaeologist working on a dig in Central America is able to identify with the spirit of an ancient Mayan woman. The attempted sacrifice of this woman is apparently linked to the destruction of the Mayan civilization. The archaeologist's ability to link herself with the early inhabitants of an archaeological site has given her great advantages in her field. The interactions between the Mayan, the archeologist, and the archeologist's estranged daughter result in a healing embrace across time. All serious students of science fiction and speculative literature should read this book.

It's hard to tell how this is science fiction, or even fantasy as it's branded on the spine. I rather think it's magical realism.

But whatever it is, it's just a beautiful, mesmerizing look at the world of the ancient Maya and how misunderstood they are by today's anti-spiritual world. Lovely writing, and some amazing craftsmanship went into the making of this novel.

Plus, I learned a great deal more about the Maya.

After a long & fruitful life as an archeaologist, Liz Butler remembers that dig, long ago in the ruins of a Mayan city, when the shade of a long-dead priestess toppled her into a pool of twilight Mayan magic. This little adventure leapt off the best-seller shelf of a general store in a tiny town over a decade ago. One of those tourist racks, here this month & gone with the summer except that this one has some gristle, guts & a timely, riveting premise. Notwithstanding a fascinating heroine, hair-raising drama & suspenseful scenes. I'm glad to see it in reprint!

This haunting novel is centered around the theme of the ancient Maya human sacrifice of messengers to the gods. The messenger would be ceremonially thrown as much as 80 feet down into a cenote, a deep water-filled sinkhole. Most of the messengers would die upon impact. The ones who survived would be sacred and become very influential by providing messages from the gods.

Elizabeth is an archaeologist who had a serious psychological event as a young woman, resulting in her hospitalization. Her estranged husband made a bargain that if Elizabeth would not attempt to contact their daughter, he would assist her release from the psychiatric ward. She becomes an accomplished academic and treasure hunter. Twenty years later, while on a dig in the Yucatan, her daughter shows up in an attempt to mend the wounds of her past.

In her own way Elizabeth is a modern version of the messenger of the gods. She survived a serious suicide attempt and now sees ghosts from the past. They direct her to ancient sites and she is considered to be very lucky--if eccentric--by her peers.

This story of the making peace with the past in order to live fully in the present is compelling and well written. At times its portrayal of human relationships is bleak--there are no easy answers or Hallmark moments. Murphy intriguingly questions the boundary between talent and insanity. A challenging yet fulfilling read.

Sit back and enjoy a well-written, well-researched novel. Pat Murphy is an excellent writer. This novel is one of the best in this genre. I loved the sensory detail: visual, olfactory, audible, gustatory. The intellectual details are fascinating; the art and science of archeology, Mayan mythology, history, and culture. And woven into the fabric of the tale are rebirth and death, this world's timeless cycles. The contrast that becomes congruency between the mother's worlds, reality, mythology and needs vs the daughter's vibrant urban ways, reality and needs is striking, jarring, and palpable. This work was described by one critic as "psychological". I would describe this story as compelling and insightful. We all exist somewhere in and out of time: those quiet perceptual moments-experiences beyond this world, those disruptive side-trips into unreality in the fiction of disconnected encounters, all transcended by life itself within our deep meaningful and sacred connections. So take a deep breath, gather your tea, lap blanket, and this book to enter other worlds. This may be your first adventure there. But if you live and read in Berkeley, you are already here. Come, see, read, and you will want to dig up Murphy's other tales!

Elizabeth Butler is a successful archaeologist and a riveting lecturer and author. Her secret - she can see ghosts of those native peoples that lived in her digs in the distant past. Is she crazy? She questions her own sanity at times, trying to take her own life and abandoning her family (including her young daughter) because she is not sane by corporate America's standards. She is much more at home in the dirt and bugs of the Yucatan peninsula, but her most recent dig is different - one of the ghosts starts speaking to her. The ghost is a priestess of the Mayan moon goddess and as such has blood on her hands - she has led human sacrifice rites and has herself performed the coup de grace in her ceremonies. It is clear that this ghost wants a sacrifice of Elizabeth, but of what type?

Enter Elizabeth's daughter Diane, fresh off a messy break-up and the death of her father, her sole care-giver growing up. Diane arrives at the dig fearing that she is going crazy - she too has the family gift for seeing the shadows, but it's not well developed. Will Diane be the sacrifice required of the ancient priestess? Will Diane go crazy before she accepts her gift? These are the questions that the novel asks, and we are carried along as the dig progresses, simultaneously with the power of the priestess over Elizabeth.

This novel won the Nebula award, granted by science fiction writers, as the best book of the year. The book is clearly not science fiction, but then, neither was Zahn's "This Immortal," a book I thoroughly enjoyed. No, the problem with this book is that it has such a promising setup, but then bogs down in melodrama. Since it's written in the first person (alternately Elizabeth and Diane), the entire novel rests on the sincerity and believability of the main 2 characters. Unfortunately, I never really believed in the characters (especially Elizabeth), so they never earned their right to act in bizarre and self-distructive ways. Similarly, the book treats luck as if it is a tangible, physical force like gravity, but the author uses it a cause for otherwise implausible events.

Finally, there were some scientific and/or philosophical incongruities. For example, for someone who so thoroughly understands the Mayan calendar, it's irritating that she apparently doesn't understand that its origin comes from the fact that the Earth's period of revolution about the sun is not exactly 365 days (it's slightly longer). Likewise, she unwisely groups Mayan and Christian religions together as both being based on human sacrifice when there seems to me to be a fundamental difference. One (divine) sacrifice as a symbol is different that the Mayan idea of lives as divine finance (the more sacrifices, the more power the god will gain). Likewise, consider Abraham's experience when God told him NOT to sacrifice his son. This point wouldn't be so irritating if it was developed, but it's not, like some other philosophical teasers the author introduces and then neglects.

Basically, my enjoyment of the book decreased the more of it I read. I grew more and more impatient with the characters and the plotline. A promising idea eventually degenerated into melodrama, when such a good idea deserves better.

This is a fantastic book, but falls into the "Speculative Fiction" category as upposed to traditional F&SF, which for me made it all the more endearing. It is a wonderful character and relationship study of mother and daughter. The charaterization is so authentic that these two women really come to life. Even down to the manorisms of the mother's smoking habit. The way she pauses to light each cigarette.

The mother is a famous archeologist who had little time for her daughters upbringing. Reluctantly her, now adult, daughter joins her on a dig of the Mayan ruins. Ghosts of the past, both the Mayans, and the mother and daughter, mix to bring the two women closer together.

One of the most unique aspects of this book is that the two women take turns telling the story, so that each chapter swithes back and forth between opposite view points.

"The Falling Woman" by Pat Murphy, © 1986

Definitely an interesting book It is not everyday you get into the mind of a crazy person. Elizabeth Butler is eccentric, to say the least, maybe, truly, crazy. The great part of this story is the weaving of her daughter, Diane, and her story. They have stories that revolve around each other (we know this from seeing both sides), they find each other to be oddly interested in the other, but, in some ways, they find each other difficult.
They have been estranged for most of the daughter's life because of the eccentric antics of the mother were objected to by the father, naturally. Then, after the daughter grew up, she did not try to find or get to know her mother, until now. She broke up with her (married) boyfriend. She quit her job (where the former boyfriend worked as well), flew of to find her Mom. She had some idea of where she was, the Mexican peninsula, Yucatan.
Elizabeth is an archaeologist studying the ancient Mayan culture. She is on site when her daughter shows up. She and her partner, Anthony Baker, are in the middle of the Yucatan excavating an old Mayan city. The story develops the relationship of people to the world and each other. Where is the greater good: the people and culture, or just future generations?
The best part of this story is the understanding of what makes a person 'crazy.' Like in "Les Miserables" where the cop chasing Jean commits suicide, this author takes you into the mind of a person and makes it seem to be the only real thing there is with no apology. It makes you feel like maybe there is something we are missing in our ordinary, real world.

Archaeologist Elizabeth Butler has a secret: she can see the shades of people from the past, going about their daily activities. This talent has led to plenty of "lucky hunches" in her career but also to questions about her sanity. Normally she just sees the past scenes playing out in front of her but cannot affect them in any way. But while excavating the Maya city of Dzibilchaltún, she encounters a shade who can speak to her: Zuhuy-kak, a priestess of the Maya moon goddess. The Maya believed that time is cyclic, and Zuhuy-kak sees in Liz a chance to bring certain events in her own life full circle.

At the same time, Liz's daughter Diane has come to Dzibilchaltún to see her mother, from whom she has been estranged for many years. The two women try warily to build a relationship even as strange occurrences mount up and Liz begins to fear for Diane's safety. "You will find here only what you bring," Liz tells us at the beginning of _The Falling Woman_, and Liz and Diane have brought a complex tangle of love, hatred, fear, and guilt.

Both women keep their emotional distance from the reader, though, for most of the book. This is consistent with the characters' personalities and histories, and this reserve is skillfully evoked in Pat Murphy's prose. Sentences are often clipped, and until late in the novel there's little internal monologue about emotions. Instead the narration focuses on gestures, dialogue, and the external sights that the women see -- at least until emotion breaks through the metaphorical dam at the intense climax.

_The Falling Woman_ is an insightful novel about mother/daughter relationships and about culturally relative definitions of sanity. Another issue, that of conquest or colonialism, is not explicitly discussed yet is ever-present. The conquest of the Maya by the Toltecs loomed large in Zuhuy-kak's life, and in the present day, it's hard to miss that the Maya still live in the area and that Maya laborers are doing most of the unsung physical work at Dzibilchaltún.

The ending is satisfactory, if slightly open-ended, and through my own lenses I can't help but see it as perfectly fitting. The ending Murphy wrote, to me, is the resolution of the mistake Zuhuy-kak really made as opposed to the mistake she thinks she made.

As I write this, it's 2011 and there's a great deal of buzz about the Maya, due to the persistent legend that the Maya calendar predicts the end of the world in 2012. In fact, when I walked into my workplace cafeteria to read some of _The Falling Woman_ during lunch, a television was playing a History Channel special about the Maya. (I couldn't hear a word of it, but it provided some stunning visuals to go with my reading!) In the spirit of everything coming around again, perhaps now is a good time to rediscover this thought-provoking book.

Elizabeth is a troubled woman archeologist. She left behind her husband and daughter to pursue a dream. She also sees the shades of the past. Are they just visions of what once was, or are they ghosts? This haunts her through her life and she wonders about her own sanity.

Her daughter Diane comes to the latest archeological dig in search of her mother. Why did her mother really leave her? What haunts her, troubles her? Diane seeks to understand her mother while just barely able to bury her own resentment for the abandonment she experienced.

This story, however, isn't just about family dynamics, or lack thereof. This is a story of the present which abruptly becomes entwined with the past. One of Elizabeth's visions see her and talks to her. Elizabeth and Diane become embroiled in a dangerous game where they may not survive. Can love triumph over the danger they face? You'll have to read this WONDERFUL book to find out. This was a truly satisfying read that kept me up past my bedtime and wishing for more. Read this book!