Singer from the Sea [Paperback]

Sheri S. Tepper (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: New York, NY, U.S.A.: Morrow/Avon (1999)
• ASIN: B000Q3IE0O
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,455,426 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars handless handmaids & heroic hunks, June 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: SINGER from the SEA (Hardcover)

O.K., so it's all been said before. I agree: Tepper's ideas get old. But (at the risk of being tendentious) whoever finds fault with male SF authors for repeatedly creating heroes who don't even measure up as bad adolescent fantasies, who tromp around their respective realms (physical and metaphysical) demanding homage on the basis of their strenghth and not on the basis of their use of it, who pass the time in proving their prowess and that IS the plot, who (like hobbyists) go about collecting lands and honors in order to collect more lands and and honors, and who pal around with advisory-figures who during said heroes' (rare) moments of reflection and doubt, assure them that everything they do is okay since "people are stupid" and have a lesson or two coming to them anyway? Huh? Nobody, that's who, and quite rightly, since many books of this description are roaring good reads, move along like houses afire, and manage the titanic feat of keeping track of two or more different chains of events which take place at different locations at approximately the same time. As nobody I know of reads science fiction for enlightenment (God help them if they do) that's about all one can ask of a science fiction novel; and at all the abovementioned tasks (namely: plot, pacing, world-construction) Tepper excels. Why, heck, she even WRITES well. Enough said.

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?

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic Tepper, March 25, 2000

By 

A. D. Ladner (Gulf Stream, Florida USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Singer from the Sea (Mass Market Paperback)

With sincere apologies to the great Isaac Asimov, there has never been
a better world builder than Sheri Tepper. And with further apologies
to Ursula LeGuin, no one handles gender issues and emotional
ambiguities better than Ms. Tepper. Her prose remains brilliant, the
plot is complex, and the character development extensive.

Summary:
On a world divided into nobility and commoners, where women are slaves
and pawns, we find that the royalty has discovered a drug which will
give them extremely long lives. The story progresses as an
intelligent, but compliant young woman becomes trapped in the politics
of the creation and distribution of this drug, and ultimately, the
planet's future becomes balanced upon her acceptance of her own
destiny.

Only Sheri Tepper, with her confident story telling, could
explore the nuances of such strong gender roles without lapsing into
modern American feminist diatribe. Her characters do not expostulate,
they talk to each other and we are led through their lives and through
their thoughts. It takes me forever to read through a Tepper book.
Her vocabulary is large, and her sentences are complicated. Ideas are
not thrust onto the page fully developed, rather they evolve with
precision through careful reading and attention to details. However,
like viewing a painting, the greatest pleasure is gained through slow
and careful attention to the work at hand. As you can tell, I highly
recommend this book. And if you can find "Grass" or
"Raising the Stones", you won't be disappointed.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, complex but not entirely convincing..., December 23, 2001

By 

bookjunkiereviews (India) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Singer from the Sea (Mass Market Paperback)

First, this book really has to be read in one sitting (two hours or more, depending on your reading speed, and your distractions). Secondly, the story follows the usual Tepper formula, in that there are a number of men who are *really evil* (the motive differing from book to book) and the heroine of the story is a woman. Of course, not all men are evil in this book. I just thought I should warn the unwary reader, who may not have read any of her other books.

What I love about Tepper is the intricacies of the worlds and the myths she crafts. SIX MOON DANCE featured a remarkable creation and destruction myth (which turns out to be real), a mystery, and several non-human species. SINGER FROM THE SEAS makes the creation myth less explicit (because it has been forgotten by some of the people who should have remembered it), and there is a definite mystery developing.

The very basic plot is that Genevieve, a noblewoman and the daughter of a high-ranking military commander, is left motherless and is packed off by her father to school. There she is to be trained to be a suitable wife, in a rigid and apparently unchanging society where women have virtually no rights, where the mortality rate among young women is surprisingly high, and where young women of her rank are forbidden to sing.

In the first part of the novel, Genevieve is very naive but quickly learns more and more about the complexities of her society, becoming an accomplished hostess (completely unappreciated by her father). She also falls for a commoner, her father's equerry, but knows that marriage between them is not according to tradition. Even a strange request from an older relative does not completely shake her sense of security, although she does begin to question some incongruities. Then, the Prince (heir to the ruler) asks for her hand, sending her into panic. To accept him means a) that she will be parted from her love, and b) that she might die young in childbirth, as do nearly all noblewomen. To refuse him means disaster for herself and her father. Her father is the stereotypical seasoned warrior, completely naive about court politics, but also completely indifferent to his daughter's feelings and aspirations.

So Genevieve runs away (i.e. begins her quest), and has a number of adventures, some resembling Bilbo Baggins's encounter with Gollum (THE HOBBIT). And then, she has a mystical experience with a creature in the seas who tells her to go back to the Prince. Before she does, she has an affair with her lover who has come to rescue her, and falls pregnant. To her puzzlement, the Prince does not stand in the way of their marriage, and even seems pleased by her pregnancy. And the couple, together with the Prince, her father and some other high officials, sets sail for the other major island on their world.

And there, events are set in motion leading to a horrific revelation about why so many young mothers die, and why the leaders of their world are so long-lived. By the end, the sinners are punished, and Genevieve emerges victorious and practically unscathed with her husband and new-born child. The quest has ended, or has it?

Parts of this novel are truly remarkable, including the prologue which might give you a wrong impression of who has married whom until the middle of the novel, the scenes in the desert, the penultimate confrontation between Genevieve and her father. Other parts are alas, less than satisfactory, including the transformation of the Marshal (Genevieve's father) from a not-very-smart but skilled warrior and leader into an inhumane man willing to sacrifice his own flesh-and-blood. The change is too quick, too easy, and too stereotyped. Furthermore, the motivation of the leaders is understandable, but they are all (with a few exceptions) stereotyped, in that they have sacrificed the lives and happiness of so many others without any qualms, and even, no nightmares. It would have helped, for example, to have shown more of the qualms faced by one youngish nobleman Willum who spares someone he loves - but has no qualms about killing others.

Making the leaders and their immediate followers a bit more multidimensional would have helped. The oldest leaders were clearly infantile, but showing the transformation of some others would have added so much more to this book.

I also admit to be one of those people who is not entirely happy with the metaphysical concepts advanced by Sherri Tepper to explain the rise and fall of worlds. It seems that worlds can be destroyed quite satisfactory through mankind's stupidity, without needing any abstract explanations. Also, for a greater sense of purpose, it would have been very interesting to see if Genevieve had been able to get out of her trouble alone (or with the help of her friends), rather than depending on the creatures from the seas.

Rating = 4.3