2009 Reading #15: Daughters of the North
Books 1-10.
11. Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares.
12. Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins by Roy Wilkins and Tom Mathews.
13. Women, Culture & Politics by Angela Y. Davis.
14. Everyone in Silico by Jim Munroe.
15. Daughters of the North (AKA The Carhullan Army) by Sarah Hall. This is last year's Tiptree Award winner, selected by people whose opinions I respect. I have mixed feelings about the book, though. It concerns another dystopia, this one in Great Britain, where climate change and flooding have precipitated a collapse and resulted in most of the population being penned up in working compounds while the government goes to war for its own interests. There are pockets of people living outside of this system, though, and one pocket is Carhullan, a farm in the mountains where a group of women live in a self-sufficient community that predates the catastrophe. It took me a while to warm up to the prose, which I found a little overwritten in the beginning, but once the story reached the farm I started to really enjoy it; there's something very satisfying in narratives of rebuilding and survival, at least for me. The matriarch of the farm is Jackie Nixon, a special forces veteran who has trained a few of the women to serve as the farm's defense unit. As time passes the interests of the unit overtake the other concerns of the farm and those living there, and the protagonist--known only as Sister--is drawn into Jackie's plans for resistance and ultimately revolution.
This is all convincingly done, and suitably tragic, but it felt to me as though some things were glossed over. There are structural gaps in the narrative that called my attention to what seemed, to me, like other gaps--Sister's lack of an emotional progression, or even identity, was the major one. Another is the book's attitude towards violence, which is weirdly contradictory; on the one hand everyone at Carhullan seems to feel that the unit itself is necessary, at least in the beginning, and yet the narrative casts it in a very negative light throughout. This will sound odd, but I wanted the book to highlight more of the positives of violence, or at least of power. It shows it as a means for initiation, for the tempering of one's body and spirit, but given that in the context of the story all of those things point towards disaster, I didn't feel there was enough balance there. Is it enough that it is women doing these things? Is that enough of a reversal to make that work? I guess I don't feel like it is, given that Russ and Charnas and Nicola Griffith have been there already. Griffith, in particular, is adamant both in her fiction and her non-fiction that women should know how to fight, should even know how to kill, if necessary. Daughters of the North seems less sure about that, and that's fine, but I wish it had explored the other side of the question a little more.
11. Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares.
12. Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins by Roy Wilkins and Tom Mathews.
13. Women, Culture & Politics by Angela Y. Davis.
14. Everyone in Silico by Jim Munroe.
15. Daughters of the North (AKA The Carhullan Army) by Sarah Hall. This is last year's Tiptree Award winner, selected by people whose opinions I respect. I have mixed feelings about the book, though. It concerns another dystopia, this one in Great Britain, where climate change and flooding have precipitated a collapse and resulted in most of the population being penned up in working compounds while the government goes to war for its own interests. There are pockets of people living outside of this system, though, and one pocket is Carhullan, a farm in the mountains where a group of women live in a self-sufficient community that predates the catastrophe. It took me a while to warm up to the prose, which I found a little overwritten in the beginning, but once the story reached the farm I started to really enjoy it; there's something very satisfying in narratives of rebuilding and survival, at least for me. The matriarch of the farm is Jackie Nixon, a special forces veteran who has trained a few of the women to serve as the farm's defense unit. As time passes the interests of the unit overtake the other concerns of the farm and those living there, and the protagonist--known only as Sister--is drawn into Jackie's plans for resistance and ultimately revolution.
This is all convincingly done, and suitably tragic, but it felt to me as though some things were glossed over. There are structural gaps in the narrative that called my attention to what seemed, to me, like other gaps--Sister's lack of an emotional progression, or even identity, was the major one. Another is the book's attitude towards violence, which is weirdly contradictory; on the one hand everyone at Carhullan seems to feel that the unit itself is necessary, at least in the beginning, and yet the narrative casts it in a very negative light throughout. This will sound odd, but I wanted the book to highlight more of the positives of violence, or at least of power. It shows it as a means for initiation, for the tempering of one's body and spirit, but given that in the context of the story all of those things point towards disaster, I didn't feel there was enough balance there. Is it enough that it is women doing these things? Is that enough of a reversal to make that work? I guess I don't feel like it is, given that Russ and Charnas and Nicola Griffith have been there already. Griffith, in particular, is adamant both in her fiction and her non-fiction that women should know how to fight, should even know how to kill, if necessary. Daughters of the North seems less sure about that, and that's fine, but I wish it had explored the other side of the question a little more.