Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

Recently finished: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood. As I mentioned last week, I appreciated this far more than I thought I would, considering Atwood's been a bit garbage politically lately and I wasn't convinced that The Handmaid's Tale needed a sequel. But Aunt Lydia's chapters are reason enough. She's such an incredibly fascinating, well-written character that the entire book becomes a compelling, urgent read, and I couldn't put it down. I also really did like Agnes in the early chapters, Daisy not-so-much, as she was more of a cipher. I appreciated the look into how institutions under oppressive systems can contain emancipatory elements.

About the ending.

The ending is one of those devices that I can't stand in dystopian fiction that has a reasonably happy ending, and that's when the hero broadcasts the horrible truth behind the regime and the regime just...falls. It's the equivalent of No Ontological Inertia but for politics—you kill the Night King and all the White Walkers die, that kind of thing.

Do people rise up when dark secrets are revealed about their government? Uh...no. Remember the Panama Papers? Edward Snowden? Photos from the toddler concentration camps? People just kind of shrug, say, "that's awful; I thought it might be something like that," and carry on with their day. I feel like most dystopian writers are coming from a very Western, individualistic view of the world, and it doesn't hold up to sociological reality.

This said, Atwood does it a bit differently and the regime falls because the secrets revealed are all the nasty plots that the baddies were planning against each other, and they basically all eat each other's faces, which does happen IRL (witness the current implosion of the Tories). So it's a bit more realistic and justifiable. I don't expect dystopian writers to write us a way out of our current clusterfuck, but...a little more detail next time, okay?

The World That We Knew, Alice Hoffman. This one's set during the Holocaust. A German Jewish mother sees the writing on the wall and decides to send her young daughter across the border into France. But she's also taking care of her own mother, who's paralyzed and can't flee, so she does what any good mother does and asks the rabbi to make a golem to protect her kid. The rabbi refuses, but his daughter, who has been watching and observing her father's work even though it's forbidden to women, is willing to do it.

I was sold on the premise alone because I love me a golem story. It's haunting and tragic, with the Angel of Death, a man in a black coat, lurking in the corners of the narrative. Again, I couldn't put it down. My main issue with it is that the rabbi's daughter was a far more interesting character than the lead character, and I would have liked more of her story and less of the romantic angst.

Current reading: Nothing yet because I was too tired to start something last night; about to start Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

*reads your book reviews*
*contemplates*

[sabotabby]

Let me know if you end up reading any of them.

The problem with book reviews, as opposed to TV and movies, as I tend to read on a delayed schedule, and I seldom read the Big Important Books that other people are reading at any given time. So I don't get to discuss them as much (Reading Wednesday helps, because I often pick up things based on other people's posts).

[mordorbot]

The problem isn't getting the baddies to eat each other's faces. Given enough time, that's inevitable. The problem is that we need to build something better to replace it with or we'll just end up with different baddies. Overthrowing the Evil Empire is the start of the story, not the end. That's the easy part.

[sabotabby]

All we know about post-Gilead is that there are a lot of academic conferences, which is probably how Atwood views utopia.

I hope I can do at least a little better in that regard but since I have magic in my universe, it’s automatically cheating *cough*Starhawk*cough*

[mordorbot]

Your magic doesn't solve anything, it just accentuates it. So, not cheating.

Part of the point of my story was supposed to be that defeating the Villains doesn't actually solve any of the underlying problems that the Villains correctly identified. Like, sure, "murder everyone" isn't a tenable solution, but neither is "stop the Villains from murdering everyone, make no other policy changes". Another novel, maybe, starting at the defeat of the Villains on chapter one and then dealing with the aftermath for the rest of the book.

I'm very curious how your Heroes intend to make positive changes to the world. I'm glad they intend to, and they have a realistic idea how difficult it's going to be. But it's gonna be even harder than that.

[sabotabby]

I think my moral, if there is one, is that institutions need to change (or be burned down and rebuilt from the ground up) to accommodate new paradigms. In my universe, it's magic, but in ours, it's catastrophic climate change, social media, automation, etc. Patrice, like the good social democrat he is, fails largely because he tries to institute reforms in a system that's fundamentally stacked against him. The solution does have to involve magic because of the premise, but only because the magic is part of the problem in the first place.

Also, haha bold of me to assume that I can fix a dystopia better than Atwood.

[mordorbot]

You haven't tried to fix the dystopia yet. You've barely started it. We're still in the topia stage.

[sabotabby]

Yes, but the seeds of what went wrong must be planted early for PAYOFF.

[mordorbot]

Yes, or in this case, the seeds of what will go right.

ETA: I mean, post dystopia.

[mistersmearcase]

We've already discussed the tv version of Handmaid but I do have to say they got a great actor, Ann Dowd, to play Aunt Lydia. She manages to be sad and sometimes relatable but meanwhile generally the worst person in the world without it seeming forced.

[sabotabby]

Given what we learn about her character in this, I’m almost willing to pick up the show again if they get as far as this book,

[mistersmearcase]

Oh I must be misremembering our earlier conversation about the show. I was thinking you had said you had decided not to watch it at all but if you’re saying pick back up I am doing an accidental mansplain vis a vis Ann Dowd.

[sabotabby]

I watched the first season, which I thought was excellent but too much trauma porn to keep going with.

[lapinlunaire]

I wish I could have liked it. I just don't like Offred because she's so boring, though at least in the show we don't get as many of her boring rambles and we see more of the (more interesting) side characters.

My #1 issue with it is that it felt so whitewashed. When I was reading the book I was under the impression that WoC were among the "undesirables" who just worked as servants or were sent away. That made more sense to me too, because that sort of politics often goes hand in hand with racism.

EDIT: I guess "whitewashed" isn't the right word. I mean the way they somehow made it some kind of diverse thing where WoC could be handmaids and where black and brown children are considered precious and important.

[sabotabby]

The racial politics of both the book and the show are...fucked up. Like, in the book it's explicitly a white supremacist society and WoC get sent to the toxic wasteland, whether or not they could have babies. I can see why they didn't want to do that in the show for both casting and worldbuilding reasons, but it means that you have to deal with white supremacy and how it affects black and brown children. Do they get to be Commanders and Wives when they grow up? Has American society solved its white supremacy problems even though they've worsened their patriarchy problems?

Then you have the added wrinkle of some characters who, iirc, their ethnicity was not specified in the books, allowing for them to be cast as Black in the show, who are explicitly white in the book's sequel. Which I kind of understand because a) Atwood likely started writing it before the show was cast, and b) she'd want to be consistent with what she established in the first one. But it still reads as whitewashing.

[lapinlunaire]

I don't know which characters were confirmed to be white, but I meant "whitewashing" more in terms of how the show presents itself rather than casting choices. It's like what you said about American society somehow solving its racism. The show feels whitewashed to me because it doesn't bother addressing how race might affect characters in a situation like this, so everyone's free to just worry about misogyny and occasionally homophobia. It's very white feminist in the sense of "race doesn't matter, we're all women!" and it weirds me out.

I can see why they didn't want to do that in the show for both casting and worldbuilding reasons

Wait, what do you mean about worldbuilding? I think the way they did worldbuilding in the show makes 0 sense. I just assumed the casting choices were just to make the show look more progressive.

but it means that you have to deal with white supremacy and how it affects black and brown children.

I agree, I think this is exactly where the show messes up. Racism suddenly doesn't seem to exist and it's never explained how that happened, and none of the characters seem to remember racism ever existing and ????

[sabotabby]

Mainly the husband and the older daughter. She goes out of her way in Testaments to talk about the girl's blond hair.

The worldbuilding doesn't make a lot of sense because of the race issue. You've got an uprising and then a government that cares a lot about patriarchy, class, and heteronormality, and somehow these are different evil people than their contemporary equivalents who care a lot about white supremacy as well. Sending all the POC to a toxic wasteland to die is one way to deal with not wanting to address this in a book that's pretty much just about gender, but as soon as they opened that can of worms by casting POC on the show, it becomes glaring just how little anyone thought about this.

Like give me one scene of Moira dealing with some racist bullshit before and then snarking about how suddenly POC have value in this society because of the fertility crisis. One of the Commanders worrying about whether his Black son will be respected enough to take his place in the hierarchy. Just...something that acknowledges historical and contemporary POC experiences in a near-future political dystopia.

[lapinlunaire]

What's the thing about Margaret Atwood's politics? I haven't heard of it.

I'm not sure I'd enjoy the new book so I'm glad you posted about it!

The World That We Knew sounds great.

By the way, where do you get ebooks? I remember you mentioned a site a while ago but I don't remember what it was.

[sabotabby]

Basically she's a typical white Toronto liberal, which involves some baggage (though I think she gets more flack than a male author would).

There's two reasons she's cancelled that I know of: One is she defended Steven Galloway, an author fired from his job at UBC after accusations of sexual assault (along with many other high-profile Canadian authors; he pulled in every connection he had) and wrote an op ed about how Me Too had gone to far. To dig herself in a further hole, she brought up that Galloway is supposedly Indigenous (which has nothing to do with anything) and cited...Joseph Boyden, an author who faked being Indigenous to sell more books. Anyway she just dug in and compared Me Too to Stalinist show trials and the whole thing is yikes.

Then there is some peak white feminist stuff, not all of which I agree with 100% but all critiques that I feel should be given space and listened to.

[lapinlunaire]

Wow that whole situation sounds like a mess. I get that talking about sexual assault when the perpetrators are men of colour is hard and a delicate balance but goddamn she really messed up on that one. And quoting a fake indigenous guy is extremely bizarre, wtf?

Anyway she just dug in and compared Me Too to Stalinist show trials and the whole thing is yikes.

oh god no

I've seen that critique before and don't agree 100% either but I agree with you.

[sabotabby]

He's totally not a POC, though. Like the only person claiming that was someone who falsely claimed Indigenous heritage to sell more books.

The whole thing is fucked. I don't know if Galloway did what he's accused of doing but it seems pretty likely?? And the fact that he dragged in his well-known literary friends to defend him does not exactly make him look more innocent.

[sabotabby]

Oh yes, I forgot to add: I get ebooks from Overdrive, which is a subscription thing that my library has.