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Thendara house (Darkover)

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"Thendara House" is a sequel, of sorts, to the previous Darkover novel "The Shattered Chain." The reason I say "of sorts" is that Bradley has always intended for each Darkover novel to work as standalone novel. The events of "Thendara House" just happen to be set after those in "The Shattered Chain" and continue the story introduced in that novel. This is a novel of the Renunciates, an order of women who have rejected society's role for them and exist as a societal alternative for women.

This novel switches between the viewpoints of two characters: Magda Lorne and Jaelle n'ha Melora. Magda, or Margali as she is called by the Darkovan natives, is of Terran heritage (and is an employee of the Terran Empire), but she was raised on Darkover since she was a child. During the events of "The Shattered Chain", Magda took the Oath of the Renunciates under duress when she was trying to rescue her former husband, Peter Haldane. By the end of that novel, she decided to honor that Oath and came to believe in it. Thendara House is the chapterhouse of the Order of the Renunciates and Magda is to spend the next six months in training at Thendara learning the ways of the Renunciates. Jaelle is the Renunciate who took Magda's oath (this is a special relationship). In order for Magda to be able to fulfill her obligations, Jaelle agreed to work at the Terran spaceport for the 6 months that Magda is at Thendara. Magda is also now married to Peter Haldane, Magda's ex-husband. Peter, like Magda, is a Terran citizen who was raised on Darkover and works for the Empire.

Neither woman truly belongs where she is. Jaelle feels alienation because she is a Darkovan working at the Spaceport and everything she is experiencing is new and different and strange to her. Her relationship with her husband is also becoming strained as she is still struggling against those gender roles she had thought she left behind when she joined the Renunciates. Magda knows that she can never truly belong to the Renunciates because she is Terran and, at least for a time, she has to hide who she really is to fit in at all.

"Thendara House" is a more complex novel than it at first seems to be. Bradley works through the ideas of belonging to a culture and what happens to those cultural transplants which are put into a new and different environment. She works with the friendships between women and the complex relationships that women can have, both casual and intimate. "Thendara House" is the best of the seven Darkover novels that I have read so far and this came as a pleasant surprise to me.

-Joe Sherry

Two different worlds have conflicting problems. One of the major ones is that the two worlds are trapped on one, together.

Two cultures, one is male-dominated and another is ruled by technology. The cultures continue to fight for dominance and in the middle of it two women from different cultures find themselves working together ...

Jaelle, now married to the Terran Peter Haldane, is trying to fit into the life of a Terran. Her life has changed drastically. She has to eat the same things that Terrans do, dress and talk like them and also get used to their lifestyle (which is nothing like her own). Two of her major problems are; one, she can't understand how the medics, who are men, can be so impersonal about women. The major issue for her though is ... her husband is supposed to stand up for her, fight for her, and think for her. What's with that?!?!?!

Magda is living with some Renunicates now, widening the way her mind think and making new friends. She finds that she can think and speak for herself. She also finds that some people, men and women alike don't support the Renunicates and their way of thinking, while others agree with Renunicate ways.

After a time the two women have to put together the information they learned as well as their differences, combining them and using them together may be the only way that they will survive ...

'Thendara House' follows 'Shattered Chains' in the Darkover series, and continues to focus on the Guild of Renunciates, particularly Magda and Jaelle, as they grow into stronger, more self-aware characters. Both are experiencing growing Psi-powers, and their destinies seem intertwined as they navigate the Terran/Darkover political world, explore the conflicts and pressures of their Oaths, and struggle to figure out exactly who they are, what they stand for, and where they belong.

I really enjoyed 'Shattered Chains' and 'Thendara House' gripped me from the very first pages. I read through this novel--longer than 'Chains'--over a weekend, during which I hardly put it down, and never left it behind! I just started 'The City of Sorcery' the next in the Renunciates grouping, and am already totally into it--thank goodness it's friday!

If you haven't yet read _The Shattered Chain_, I suggest you do so first. Although all of the Darkover books are theoretically standalone, this one is definitely improved by having some background.

That said, I love this book. The only minor quibble I have about it is that I get a slightly stronger sense of Magda's character than of Jaelle's, even though the book is supposed to focus equally on both women.

One of the best things about this book, to me, is that even the antagonistic characters are not portrayed as evil. Bradley makes excellent use of the shades of gray in every character throughout the book.

(Also, it's so nice to have a major character refusing to define herself exclusively as heterosexual or lesbian! Definite yay!)

The second in the series of stories depicting Magdalen Lorne, the Terran struggling to belong to a world in which her people are extremly distrusted, and Jaelle n'ha Melora, the native struggling against her expected duty and place in feminine society. Thrown together in the first novel, Magda and Jaelle become fast friends, the only two who do not belong anywhere and find comfort only in each other. Thendara House is the story of these women, one a native trying to work and leave peacefully with the alien Terrans, and one a Terran trying to pass successfully as a native, who discover that one cannot be what she is not, and one cannot escape that which is destined to be. Struggling to control their untrained laran (ESP), they find peace only in the crux of disaster, and finally learn that they cannot always rely on their own stregnth to survive. A must read for the Darkover fan, and ignorant "Terran" alike

Years have passed since I read Thendara House for the first time.
I have read it at least five times since. The essence of humanity
is revealed from two perspectives; Technological vs. pre-industrial
civilization. I find myself abhoring the trappings of "progress"
and the subsequent belief that people must move forward at all costs.
I, like Magda, quickly learned in Thendara House that a person can be incapable
of understanding the subtleties of human behavior and responses,
but more importantly, come to understand that there are as many ways to live as there are people living.

Darkover, for those unfamiliar with it, is a planet orbiting a dim red sun and inhabited by the descendants of a Terran colony ship who were lost to the rest of humanity for a thousand years. During that time they interbred with the humanoid natives of the planet and developed psychic powers, which they call laran. They also regressed to a pretechnological, feudalistic society in which women are generally, at best, second-class citizens; in the Dry Towns they're actually chattel, chained at puberty. Eventually they were rediscovered by the so-called Terran Empire, which is more like a republic than anything, and somewhat against their will were brought back into the larger human society: their planet is poor in metal and offers little in the way of trade goods, but its location makes it a vital stop-off for spacegoing craft. This novel, which directly follows The Shattered Chain: A Darkover Novel and also references The Forbidden Tower and The Spell Sword, takes place 50 or 60 years after the rediscovery; the Terrans are theoretically restricted to their spaceports and certain Trade Cities, although they do overflights to make maps and send out anthropologists and other operatives, in native guise, in order to learn more about the society and the planet. The highest-ranking officer of the Empire is Russell Montray, who hates the place with a passion, but numerous younger personnel were born onworld, speak the language, and think of themselves as at least pseudo-Darkovan. One such is Magda Lorne, whose name in Darkoven is Margali. After the adventures described in "The Shattered Chain," she has gone to live in Thendara House, one of the facilities of the Guild of Renunciates (informally known as Free Amazons), an order of women who refuse to bind themselves to men except by the informal, freemate form of marriage, and who have no surnames, calling themselves only "daughter of [my mother]." The Amazon with whom she shared her adventures, Jaelle, has freemated with Magda's ex-husband, Peter Haldane, and gone to live in the Terran enclave at Thendara Spaceport. This novel is the story of their struggles to adjust to their new environments.

At first it seems that Jaelle's adjustment is the more difficult. Unused to technology and to what she considers "immodest" clothing, she's even more troubled by the attitudes of her husband, who claims to love her yet turns out to be insecure enough to want to run her life--exactly the kind of thing she entered the Guild to avoid. Magda, at first, misses primarily material things, like hot showers, but she soon discovers that her adjustment will be one of attitude. (Anyone who has read accounts of white settlers captured by Indians in the 17th-19th Centuries will notice subtle analogies to their experience.) Regular Guild Meetings challenge her to think differently about women in general than she ever has before, and when the rejected husband of a new Guildmember tries to break in and reclaim the woman, her impassioned defense of her "sisters" earns her, not their acclaim, but an informal trial that almost results in her ouster, all because she doesn't behave according to the Darkovan military code, which she barely knew existed. As time goes by, however, Magda realizes that her marriage to Peter failed for deeper reasons than she ever suspected. Meanwhile Jaelle struggles to save hers and to cope with Terran inclinations to meddle with her society, including Montray's resolve to find Andrew Carr, the only survivor of a crashed plane, who has "gone over the wall" and become "Dom Ann'dra," marrying Callista Lanart, sister of the Regent of Alton, and fathering two daughters with her. And both women must also cope with the frightening manifestations of their awakening laran--Jaelle's the long-suppressed heritage of her Comyn ancestry, Magda's stimulated by her contact with Darkovan powers.

Besides addressing questions of (as the bacover blurb expresses it) "love and marriage...male and female...justice and injustice," the story also probes into issues such as medical ethics and the effect of the introduction of modern technology on "backward" planets, a concept that will be familiar to any fan of Star Trek. Yet it does so within the context of a complex and interesting plot and a large cast of fascinating people, including Camilla, the aging emmasca (neuter) Amazon; Cholayna Ayres, the Terran Head of Intelligence at Thendara; Montray's son Wade, who like Magda and Peter is planet-born; Jaelle's business partner Rafaella; Alessandro Li, a special representative of the Terran Imperial Senate; and Jaelle's cousin, Lady Rohana Ardais, who tries to persuade (or perhaps force) her to take the Comyn Council seat that's hers by blood and commit her unborn daughter to Comyn training.

With a copyright date of 1983, I find it puzzling that Bradley didn't incorporate more contemporary concepts into her future, such as gay and women's liberation: in the Terran enclave Jaelle is listed in the records as "Mrs. Peter Haldane" (not even as *Ms.* Haldane, which, given her lack of a surname, would seem more logical), and there's an implication that gay sex is considered repulsive by most Terrans (though not by Darkovans, except for one religious sect, the cristoforos). And even given a cold and hostile planet to adjust to, I've never quite been able to understand (despite having read many Darkover books before this one) why the Terran settlers, coming as they must have from a more egalitarian society, suppressed half their population. (The semi-official Darkover website, www.darkover.com, suggests that they were mostly speakers of Spanish, Gaelic, and English, from which current Darkover languages evolved; this may have something to do with it, though what isn't quite clear.)

In order to follow what's going on here, you should probably first read the three novels product-linked above, then go on to City of Sorcery.

interesting story of the conflict between society and the
individual and how equality can be an illusion until the
individual takes a stand and fights for what they want.
Also discusses the different desires of different women --
no all women are alike.

I liked the book because it struck specific cords. It speaks of love in it's many forms, but mainly it speaks of mixed loyalties. Everyone can relate to some of the events on an interpersonal base, but mainly people can go beyond the situations and relate to the feelings. The author has a brilliant writing that vividly evokes the characters feelings. It makes for good reading, especially when the reader can keep an open mind about the particular way in witch human relations are presented, non judgmentally.

This was the first Darkover novel I read and since then I've read probably 6 or 8 others. I think I like this one the best, although Hawkmistress and Stormqueen come in close. The conflict between the two societies is enhanced in this novel because of the culture shock Jaelle and Magda go through in each others opposite world.
I would recommend this to everyone.