This is a beautiful book. I wasn't sure at first, I guess because it takes a while to figure out what story is being told. The book is in three tones: one is the story of the young woman Ann Grant attending her friend's wedding and falling in love with another guest, another is of Ann Lord, who is Ann Grant after three marriages and four children, who is in and out of lucidity on her deathbed, the third, and shortest, is a dialogue between two voices that are never explicitly named. The three streams cut across one another and give a lovely succinct sense of this woman's life (and possibly a sense of her afterlife, depending on your reading of the incorporeal dialogue stream).
Ann Lord She has her four children around her in her final days, but her thoughts are much less on them than on all the men in her life. I particularly liked the way the three husbands get condensed sometimes -- those experiences of falling in love that seem so unique in the moment become fungible at a remove, when evaluating what mattered over a whole life.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Monday, May 10, 2010
Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)
Even though I used to be a sci fi head as a teenager, I'd never read this book, and it was lying around my place the other week when I was in bed all day with a cold, so I picked it up. It's pretty engrossing, in a Harry Potter/murder mystery kind of way. But it also struck me as either extremely un-self aware or as very subtly super-colonialist in its views. Were it written in the 18th century the latter would make more sense to me as a political view. As it is, I think it's the former.
The book takes place on a planet called Arrakis that has been colonized by a state that spans many other planets and has lots of military and economic might. Arrakis is very rich in a natural resource they call spice, which is an addictive drug that everyone really loves and that only exists on this one planet. But the planet has a big problem which is that it's all desert, and the large indigenous population has so little access to water they can barely survive (you might think they'd be trading spice for water but in fact the colonists don't trade, they just go in and take the spice themselves). The way in which it's un-self aware is this: on the one hand, Herbert clearly loves this people he has made up. They're so much cleverer and more beautiful than the technologically-dependent money-driven colonists. You get all of that noble savage stuff, or maybe it's the modern fetishization of the non-white world, it really comes to the same thing. But even though they're so strong and so much more knowledgeable than the thieving colonists, they only win the battle because of two successive leaders, both of whom are sons of colonist fathers -- the first one has a native Arrakian mother, and he does a lot for Arrakis, but the real saviour is the guy who is a full-blooded colonial prince who had to escape to the deserts of Arrakis because of a grave injustice done to his family.
Maybe it's terribly naive of me to be surprised by this kind of white man as saviour narrative in a storyline where someone seems at the same time respect and honour the other (imaginary) culture. But really, by 1965 I thought people were a little past this kind of thing. Maybe I was also surprised because of how much I'd heard about this classic, and that in telling me to read it no-one ever mentioned the racist sub-text, but only told me that it was a great read. It is that, with the usual sci-fi caveat that you have to read for the ideas and ignore the nuts and bolts of the writing style.
The book takes place on a planet called Arrakis that has been colonized by a state that spans many other planets and has lots of military and economic might. Arrakis is very rich in a natural resource they call spice, which is an addictive drug that everyone really loves and that only exists on this one planet. But the planet has a big problem which is that it's all desert, and the large indigenous population has so little access to water they can barely survive (you might think they'd be trading spice for water but in fact the colonists don't trade, they just go in and take the spice themselves). The way in which it's un-self aware is this: on the one hand, Herbert clearly loves this people he has made up. They're so much cleverer and more beautiful than the technologically-dependent money-driven colonists. You get all of that noble savage stuff, or maybe it's the modern fetishization of the non-white world, it really comes to the same thing. But even though they're so strong and so much more knowledgeable than the thieving colonists, they only win the battle because of two successive leaders, both of whom are sons of colonist fathers -- the first one has a native Arrakian mother, and he does a lot for Arrakis, but the real saviour is the guy who is a full-blooded colonial prince who had to escape to the deserts of Arrakis because of a grave injustice done to his family.
Maybe it's terribly naive of me to be surprised by this kind of white man as saviour narrative in a storyline where someone seems at the same time respect and honour the other (imaginary) culture. But really, by 1965 I thought people were a little past this kind of thing. Maybe I was also surprised because of how much I'd heard about this classic, and that in telling me to read it no-one ever mentioned the racist sub-text, but only told me that it was a great read. It is that, with the usual sci-fi caveat that you have to read for the ideas and ignore the nuts and bolts of the writing style.
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