Customer Reviews

The two of them

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In the vein of the Alyx stories, Russ offers up another gutsy time and space travelling heroine. There's plenty of adventure and plenty of feminist content, as well as some interesting narrative structures. (As when Russ briefly breaks the narrative flow to comment on the story in her capacity as narrator.) Self referential writing can easily become self conscious and stilted. It's hard to pull off, but when it works, it works well. Russ pulls it off. This is vintage Russ--more accesible than The Female Man, and more explicitly feminist than the Alyx stories.

I've written some pretty cranky reviews lately; it's a pleasure to write a nice one. Parts of this old book are superb--gripping--make you reach the end of a chapter and sit staring at the wall musing on what you just read and saying very quietly, "wow..."

It isn't all like that, alas; if it were, this would be one of the great classics of the SF genre. The superb parts are the middle, when Russ gets her narrative rolling and tells a straight story. The goodness begins with a portrayal of a bright, rebellious teen in the 1950s as she explodes out of her conventional life. It continues as the grown Irene, now an agent for the shadowy Trans-temporal authority, explores the iniquitous depths of Ka'abah, a colony world that is attempting to recreate a society based on a fantasy of the Arabian Nights, and in the process recreating the worst possibly kind of subjugation of the female spirit. Irene finally cannot stomach what she is seeing and determines to rescue one bright 12-year-old girl before her soul is completely crushed. But Irene's partner objects, and things begin to go wrong. Is he patronizing her in a way that is more subtle but just as demeaning, as the Ka'abah men patronize their women?

The problems with the book are the bread on this jammy sandwich. The opening chapter is mannered, self-conscious, distanced in a style of narrative that was just so trendy in the seventies and which is now just plain labored and irritating. It takes grit to wade through this now; I actually wondered why the book was still on my shelves and almost gave up rereading it.

The other slice of bread is the ending. The author intrudes herself here, and not in a clever or cute or insightful way, but in a way that I read today as simply a cop-out. She got to a certain point in the story where her characters were at complete loggerheads with each other and with the world she had designed for them. There was no clear way forward; to get them to any kind of resolution would take tens of thousands more words; so she threw up a firework of style tricks and ducked out behind a puff of smoke.

Still, the middle is just so darn good it redeems the frame. Oh! There's a fair amount of sex here. A lot of sex for 1978, and still today well beyond a PG-13.