Sarah Hall, The Carhullan Army
Jun. 21st, 2008 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraThis year’s Tiptree winner, and an interesting read – there are some things I like about it a lot, especially the setting/world-building, but there are also bits where it seems to slide right past me, and unfortunately these are increasingly more common towards the end. These may, however, represent problems with me as a reader rather than with the book; reviews I've read have been largely favourable, although others seem to have issues as well.
It’s set in a future Britain, rigidly controlled, with inhabitants leading lives of quiet and increasingly restricted desperation. The narrator, Sister, leaves the city to join a community of women on a hill farm; a community that is driven and shaped by its leader, Jackie Nixon. Jackie wants control, and uses Sister as a tool to do so – as she’s used everyone else in the community.
The details of this are excellent; the daily struggle in the city and the grinding down of any resistance or any humanity, Sister’s walk up to Carhullan and entry into another world; the day-to-day effort of scratching a living from a Cumbrian hill farm. Sister’s husband, Andrew, shifts from a fellow student, political and enthusiastic, to someone who sees no point in anything other than compromise (and the fact that the Authority’s restrictions fall harder on women, with forcible IUD insertion, is particularly well-drawn here, when Andrew comments on how it’s nice to feel Sister without any barriers, completely negating her own experience of the procedure).
When Sister arrives at the farm she is locked in a dog box, with minimal water and no food, for four days of fear, pain and hallucinations. Later, when she and the rest of Jackie’s core fighting unit are training to attack Rith, she goes back twice, practising to resist torture – and helps torture the other unit members for the same purpose. Her testimony on the attack on Rith is mostly lost, along with all the records from Rith that might have given Sister any other identity; she remains as the only witness.
I am, however, not sure what she is a witness to. There are hints in the text that Jackie is lying to the women, and/or that her decisions will destroy them; her choice of Sister to decide first about the shift to an offensive approach is also a key moment where I don’t feel I grasp all the implications. At the end of the book I feel cold, and distant from the characters, and although I regret what’s happened I don’t grieve for it.
Looking at the Tiptree announcement – one of the things they mention is the book’s use of violence, and women as agents of violence. I think that’s an interesting point. Mary Gentle’s Ash is the other book that springs to mind when I think about women fighting, and I think that foregrounds physical violence far more than The Carhullan Army does, where actual physical (as opposed to psychological) harm is off-stage or lost. Sister says she kills people, but, unless I’ve forgotten something, we never see her do it. I do think it shows how to achieve power, and the prices people pay for this, but there’s a gap in showing how they use it.
It’s set in a future Britain, rigidly controlled, with inhabitants leading lives of quiet and increasingly restricted desperation. The narrator, Sister, leaves the city to join a community of women on a hill farm; a community that is driven and shaped by its leader, Jackie Nixon. Jackie wants control, and uses Sister as a tool to do so – as she’s used everyone else in the community.
The details of this are excellent; the daily struggle in the city and the grinding down of any resistance or any humanity, Sister’s walk up to Carhullan and entry into another world; the day-to-day effort of scratching a living from a Cumbrian hill farm. Sister’s husband, Andrew, shifts from a fellow student, political and enthusiastic, to someone who sees no point in anything other than compromise (and the fact that the Authority’s restrictions fall harder on women, with forcible IUD insertion, is particularly well-drawn here, when Andrew comments on how it’s nice to feel Sister without any barriers, completely negating her own experience of the procedure).
When Sister arrives at the farm she is locked in a dog box, with minimal water and no food, for four days of fear, pain and hallucinations. Later, when she and the rest of Jackie’s core fighting unit are training to attack Rith, she goes back twice, practising to resist torture – and helps torture the other unit members for the same purpose. Her testimony on the attack on Rith is mostly lost, along with all the records from Rith that might have given Sister any other identity; she remains as the only witness.
I am, however, not sure what she is a witness to. There are hints in the text that Jackie is lying to the women, and/or that her decisions will destroy them; her choice of Sister to decide first about the shift to an offensive approach is also a key moment where I don’t feel I grasp all the implications. At the end of the book I feel cold, and distant from the characters, and although I regret what’s happened I don’t grieve for it.
Looking at the Tiptree announcement – one of the things they mention is the book’s use of violence, and women as agents of violence. I think that’s an interesting point. Mary Gentle’s Ash is the other book that springs to mind when I think about women fighting, and I think that foregrounds physical violence far more than The Carhullan Army does, where actual physical (as opposed to psychological) harm is off-stage or lost. Sister says she kills people, but, unless I’ve forgotten something, we never see her do it. I do think it shows how to achieve power, and the prices people pay for this, but there’s a gap in showing how they use it.
