Jo Walton, My Real Children
Oct. 22nd, 2014 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraJo Walton is one of those authors whose work I usually end up at best admiring, but not connecting with (and John M Ford, who provided the epigraph, is/was another). I liked Ha’Penny (the middle of the Small Change trilogy) but Among Others, Tooth and Claw, the Sulien books etc have all failed to work for me at eliciting anything besides polite interest. My Real Children does the same; it’s readable, it has an interesting central conceit, and it totally fails to have anything like the emotional impact described by other reviewers on me. While this is obviously an individual response I did get tearful over a Sandra Boynton board book recently so it’s not entirely due to my inherent heartlessness.
Patricia/Tricia/Trish/Patty/Pat Cowan is in a nursing home, severely confused, but over and above her dementia is the fact that she remembers two lives, two worlds, which diverge off from the moment when she accepted or rejected a rather desperate marriage proposal. In the world where she accepts, Trish has a miserable marriage but eventually makes her way out and helps to build networks and communities reflected in the more optimistic state of the world as a whole (a research base on the moon, for example); in the world where she says no, Pat had a personally happy and fulfilling life as a writer of Italian guidebooks, spending every summer in Florence and her life with a female partner, Bee, while around them the world becomes increasingly hostile and unstable, with nuclear exchanges, privatization (I am just trying to remember if Thatcher shows up in either history; although Pat is British the history always feels more global, even when IRA bombs show up) and rigid policing of identities. As time passes the book does, as some reviewers have mentioned, become a little like reading a series of Christmas newsletters, and some of the minor characters do suffer from this. Doug, Trish’s famous pop musician son - “I have to get off the smack, Mum," he said. "Heroin is terrible stuff.") does not sound to me like a real person, and a grandchild - Jamie - gets about one line of characterisation (he is a bully, probably because his mother went back to work after eight weeks of maternity leave leaving him to nannies and not, the characters are careful to point out, because she is a single mother) before being killed off, which seems more than a little unfair. Other parts of it - Pat's religious faith, for example - work better.
I agree with Gwyneth Jones about the interesting questions that don't get followed up on (parenthood, for example, and its intersections of biological and social imperatives), and also the ending (and now I want to reread her Life, for fictional female scientists I find more three-dimensional than Bee, but my copy is in another city) trying to do too much and failing; also, I've never been fond of Lady or the Tiger conclusions, however neat they feel for the narrative. Despite all this I still vaguely want to read Lifelode, although in checking I hit a review which seemed to think there'd never been a positive polyamorous relationship in fantasy before, which, hmm. Diane Duane's Door series, Le Guin depending on how you read things, and any number of other unconventional rearrangements, all the way back to the more optimistic Arthurian retellings, surely? (I think the positive one I'm thinking of is Parke Godwin, although I suppose you could well argue that Arthurian and emotional positivity are not all that congruent as concepts...). Anyway. Tastes, as they say, may differ.
Patricia/Tricia/Trish/Patty/Pat Cowan is in a nursing home, severely confused, but over and above her dementia is the fact that she remembers two lives, two worlds, which diverge off from the moment when she accepted or rejected a rather desperate marriage proposal. In the world where she accepts, Trish has a miserable marriage but eventually makes her way out and helps to build networks and communities reflected in the more optimistic state of the world as a whole (a research base on the moon, for example); in the world where she says no, Pat had a personally happy and fulfilling life as a writer of Italian guidebooks, spending every summer in Florence and her life with a female partner, Bee, while around them the world becomes increasingly hostile and unstable, with nuclear exchanges, privatization (I am just trying to remember if Thatcher shows up in either history; although Pat is British the history always feels more global, even when IRA bombs show up) and rigid policing of identities. As time passes the book does, as some reviewers have mentioned, become a little like reading a series of Christmas newsletters, and some of the minor characters do suffer from this. Doug, Trish’s famous pop musician son - “I have to get off the smack, Mum," he said. "Heroin is terrible stuff.") does not sound to me like a real person, and a grandchild - Jamie - gets about one line of characterisation (he is a bully, probably because his mother went back to work after eight weeks of maternity leave leaving him to nannies and not, the characters are careful to point out, because she is a single mother) before being killed off, which seems more than a little unfair. Other parts of it - Pat's religious faith, for example - work better.
I agree with Gwyneth Jones about the interesting questions that don't get followed up on (parenthood, for example, and its intersections of biological and social imperatives), and also the ending (and now I want to reread her Life, for fictional female scientists I find more three-dimensional than Bee, but my copy is in another city) trying to do too much and failing; also, I've never been fond of Lady or the Tiger conclusions, however neat they feel for the narrative. Despite all this I still vaguely want to read Lifelode, although in checking I hit a review which seemed to think there'd never been a positive polyamorous relationship in fantasy before, which, hmm. Diane Duane's Door series, Le Guin depending on how you read things, and any number of other unconventional rearrangements, all the way back to the more optimistic Arthurian retellings, surely? (I think the positive one I'm thinking of is Parke Godwin, although I suppose you could well argue that Arthurian and emotional positivity are not all that congruent as concepts...). Anyway. Tastes, as they say, may differ.
