Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand

A novel that is as messy as the Goddess it portrays.

It's the end of the world, as we know it. Patriarchy has been in the driver's seat for over 3,000 years. The Benandanti, an ancient order of dudes, have been suppressing the goddess ever since. But now the Goddess is back with a vengeance and Kate Sweeney Cassidy is in the middle of a mystic triangle between the two chosen ones who have been bred to combat the coming threat: Oliver Wilde Crawford (an eccentrically brilliant pretty boy) and Angelica di Rienzi, a pre-Raphelite beauty with a ferocious will, trailing a scent of sandlewood and oranges.

While I think the book has some major problems, Hand's writing, subject matter and some of her characters make me want to try more of her work.

The first third of the book is really slow - I had to wade through it. The descriptions of the university and the portentous details slow the story going forward. We also get flashbacks from Magda Kurtz, the catalyst character who sets the wolf amongst the pigeons. Magda's ill-fated expedition is necessary to the story but where it is placed further slows down getting to know Kate, Oliver and Angelica. Add to this that whenever anything mystical/magical happens everything in the real world seems to freeze and you get a very slow pace to the start of the book. The narrative finally does get going, Magda fulfills her purpose and goes on her way, but it takes a damn long time to get going.

I wonder if the first half of the book - 1975 - couldn't have been folded into the second half of the book - 1995. That way Hand could have slowly revealed what had happened in the past and thus prevented readers from guessing what seemed to me to be the obvious fate of one of the characters from 1975. Not to drop any spoilers, but when a mysterious figure shows up in 1995 it was instantly obvious to me that this was a character from 1975. If 1975 events had been slowly mixed with 1995 events it would have made it much harder or at least would have greatly delayed me guessing the 'big reveal' that doesn't happen until the final climax.

The novel's plot centers around a ritual. The problem I often have with mythical stories, a problem I had with 'Waking the Moon', is that I didn't feel like Kate had any vital human choice or action to push the plot forward. In a novel I want the main character to do something. Here it felt like a bad Christmas dinner where your alienated family invites you to dinner to 'act' your part for the feast and then go away again. Kate had her part in the climax, but it felt generic and not particular to her character.

The only reason I know that Kate is the main character is that the book alternates between her first person narration and a third person limited narration that switches between other characters in the book. But Kate's character, while engaging in someways - I like her romance later in the book - is so passive that she needs a first person 'I' to let the reader know she is special.

I really like that Hand uses a thriller structure with a dark Goddess villain to deal with a subject matter that would usually turn readers off: the patriarchal basis of Western culture for the past 3,000 plus years and the return of matriarchal ways. Usually this type of binary thought would be pretty dreadful for a work of fiction, but Hand isn't either/or and in the tradition of true artists wants to chart an individual and messily organic path. Her method doesn't work for the structure but there is lots of good stuff in this brew.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

Re-reading this novel was a humbling and a little melancholy experience for me, but also enjoyable. I first read and absolutely loved The Moon is a Harsh Mistress when I was thirteen or fourteen and COMPLETELY missed that Mannie the narrator has a faux-Russian accent. I mean, it is right there on the first page!

"Not fastest. At Bell Labs, Buenos Aires, down Earthside they've got a thinkum a tenth [supercomputer Mike's] size which can answer almost before you ask. But matters whether you get answer in micro-second rather than millisecond as long as correct?"

Da, went completely over my head it did as I read silently to myself, hiding in my bedroom all through my tormented adolescence.

Now, I may just have flushed out what didn't compute or what I just didn't have a frame of reference for. Heinlein's sexual politics for one. He comes up with a utopia that is supposed to be better for women, but really the main female character in the book is just there to look good and fall in love with the narrator Mannie. Women have more power on Luna because they are a scarce commodity (the ratio of men to women is very high), but this just boils down to sex objects on pedestals, not any type of feminism. Much of the politics-politics, the rational anarchism as it is called in the book, or libertarianism I suppose in the modern context, went over my head when I first read it. Much of that was actually interesting this time, though I still feel it sounds like a great plan as long as you are never in a position of need yourself. Heinlein is still pretty good at presenting this stuff entertainingly at this point in his writing career, though some of the lectures were starting to get long.

Some stuff that did appeal, how Heinlein characters knew everything and were always more intelligent than their opponents has lost some of its coolness factor, now that I'm not a young teen with an enormous appetite for power fantasies. Mannie, the Professor, and Mike the supercomputer (with Wyo looking on) hatch a plan to lead a revolt for the freedom of Luna and then they enact the plan, and then....the plan goes exactly to plan because they are all so damn smart, nobody else can come up with anything smarter or unexpected to stop them. A lot of Heinlein's supermen characters and the worlds they live in comes off as Papa Heinlein playing god in his own little sandbox and not really engaging with the big, complicated, messy, unfair, chancy world outside.

(Though to be fair, the one thing that struck me this time through was that though the revolution part of the plan goes off without a hitch, any plan for an anarchist/libertarian system afterward is quickly set aside by the people that the revolutionaries free. My sense is that 'the stupids' (all the non-Heinleinian supermen and women) are going to set up a settled ordered democratic government with lots of rules and regulations and taxes. In the end Mannie is thinking about leaving the moon and heading for the less regulated Asteroids. A very American, very western (in the sense of cowboys on the frontier) ending.)

The best part of the book is the relationship of Mike, the newly wakened supercomputer, with his first human friend Mannie, the narrator. This is the part that I do remember from my first reading of the book and its still the part that I feel Heinlein got right this time through. Perhaps because Mike is, in a way, a child at the beginning of the book and then grows up as the novel progresses this actually makes him the most rounded of the characters in the book.

So I enjoyed the story, but Heinlein is that uncle I worshiped when I was younger and now have discovered is all too human, like the rest of us. It would be all too easy just to bash and dismiss someone who was very important to me when younger. I've listed a lots of things that I don't like in the book, but I'm still going to treasure those bits that get my mind and heart firing.

On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin

Chatwin writes beautiful sentences as he charts the cradle to grave journey of two Welsh farmer twins. Some may find the resolute narrowness of Lewis and Benjamin's lives, wed to their farm "The Vision", boring. The only event of the outside world that impinges on their lives is whether one or both might be sent to fight in the blood-bath of World War I. The language, a prose style that isn't showy, yet is (seemingly) effortless in its flow, carried me through the pages with its understated beauty.

Yet the story, with the psychically linked twins, various melodramatic moments such as a veteran left out in the rain and feuding family, seems some how awkward and ill-judged in comparison to the top-flight prose. From reading Songlines I have the sense that Chatwin intuitively organized his books. On the Black Hill generally follows the twins through their entire lives, but in the last section dealing with their old age it suddenly jumps, for a time, on to another character and her life. The twins reappear but the focus is lost and the rest of the book peters out. So I wasn't that impressed with Chatwin's fictional efforts, but as a crafter of language I will read on happily.