Helpful Score: 1
A profound and perplexing novel, equal parts cautionary tale, dystopian nightmare, and fever dream, where nothing is quite as it seems and humanity's time on earth may be drawing to a close.
If you're looking for a carefully plotted and seamlessly created end-of-times story, this isn't it. Erdrich paints with a broad brush, or perhaps just limns with pastel chalks, and then smears them a bit for a vaguely implied meaning that shifts even as the reader examines it.
Basically, the story follows Cedar Hawk Songmaker, the adopted daughter of a white couple in Minneapolis whose genetic inheritance is Native American, though details are vague and not always accurate. She has come of age in a near-future world that is changing from forces neither clearly understood nor fully explained to the reader. But in addition to rapid climate change â her home is a Minneapolis in which it no longer snows â something seems to be happening to the plant and animal life forms, including the human ones. Domestic animals no longer breed true â chickens are now something that more closely resemble iguanas, agricultural crops yield inedible or unpalatable new fruits, and something (which maddeningly remains undefined) is happening to human reproduction.
This is a nearly fatal flaw, since much of the action springs from this sea change. It's unclear whether women are having trouble conceiving (there's a passing reference to parthogenesis and a more than passing reference to Christianity's concept of virgin birth), or whether fetal and maternal death rates have soared, or whether the children being born are something more or less than human. It's as if evolution has either made a U-turn, or perhaps is curving off into some new version of the Cambrian Explosion.
And it's all of great import to Cedar, because she has recently discovered herself to be pregnant, following an intense affair with a young man she's not sure she wants to make a family with. These personal-level concerns quickly get absorbed by more pressing concerns when a vague and shadowy theocracy arises and begins rounding up pregnant woman. Cedar chooses this time to demand information on her biological parents and journeys to the Ojibwe reservation where she meets her biological mother and her mother's new partner, a man whose concentration is largely spent on finding reasons every day to eschew suicide. While on this journey of personal exploration, she slowly realizes that the danger she has been repeatedly warned about is quite real. Most of the rest of the book is set against Cedar's attempts to evade capture or to escape when she is apprehended, in the company of various companions.
And again, that menacing but vague background threatens to dissolve into utter incoherence. Why are pregnant women being imprisoned? (Because, even though it's being presented as âa way to keep you and your baby safeâ, it's not.) What is happening to the babies? Are mothers routinely murdered during unnecessary Cesarean sections? And are they unnecessary or is it really impossible for these maybe-not-human infants to pass through a human woman's birth canal? There's a subplot about a âvolunteer womb corpsâ which quickly becomes essentially slavery as women are implanted with fertilized embryos harvested from existing stocks, or (if they have proven capable of bearing and survived) are artificially inseminated with frozen sperm stocks. Why? And if they're so important to the future of the human race, why does the shadowy theocracy keep them imprisoned instead of elevating them to nearly goddess-like status?
It just doesn't work.
And that's a shame, because there's a lot of good stuff here. The adventure of Cedar running and evading capture, the relationships she builds along the way, the recurrent Christian theme of Word made Flesh and how or whether that relates to the changes in the biosphere, Cedar's pregnancy journal which she keeps even when virtually everything else is abandoned so that she can hand something to her child once it is born, the family secrets that are revealed, the pushme-pullyou of Native versus White value systems and spirituality â this is all great material, but it really struggles to rise from the primordial ooze that just refuses to form a coherent matrix.
âThe first thing that happens at the end of the world is that we don't know what is happening,â one of her characters observes. The problem is, neither does the reader, and it's a flaw this ambitious work just can't overcome.
If you're looking for a carefully plotted and seamlessly created end-of-times story, this isn't it. Erdrich paints with a broad brush, or perhaps just limns with pastel chalks, and then smears them a bit for a vaguely implied meaning that shifts even as the reader examines it.
Basically, the story follows Cedar Hawk Songmaker, the adopted daughter of a white couple in Minneapolis whose genetic inheritance is Native American, though details are vague and not always accurate. She has come of age in a near-future world that is changing from forces neither clearly understood nor fully explained to the reader. But in addition to rapid climate change â her home is a Minneapolis in which it no longer snows â something seems to be happening to the plant and animal life forms, including the human ones. Domestic animals no longer breed true â chickens are now something that more closely resemble iguanas, agricultural crops yield inedible or unpalatable new fruits, and something (which maddeningly remains undefined) is happening to human reproduction.
This is a nearly fatal flaw, since much of the action springs from this sea change. It's unclear whether women are having trouble conceiving (there's a passing reference to parthogenesis and a more than passing reference to Christianity's concept of virgin birth), or whether fetal and maternal death rates have soared, or whether the children being born are something more or less than human. It's as if evolution has either made a U-turn, or perhaps is curving off into some new version of the Cambrian Explosion.
And it's all of great import to Cedar, because she has recently discovered herself to be pregnant, following an intense affair with a young man she's not sure she wants to make a family with. These personal-level concerns quickly get absorbed by more pressing concerns when a vague and shadowy theocracy arises and begins rounding up pregnant woman. Cedar chooses this time to demand information on her biological parents and journeys to the Ojibwe reservation where she meets her biological mother and her mother's new partner, a man whose concentration is largely spent on finding reasons every day to eschew suicide. While on this journey of personal exploration, she slowly realizes that the danger she has been repeatedly warned about is quite real. Most of the rest of the book is set against Cedar's attempts to evade capture or to escape when she is apprehended, in the company of various companions.
And again, that menacing but vague background threatens to dissolve into utter incoherence. Why are pregnant women being imprisoned? (Because, even though it's being presented as âa way to keep you and your baby safeâ, it's not.) What is happening to the babies? Are mothers routinely murdered during unnecessary Cesarean sections? And are they unnecessary or is it really impossible for these maybe-not-human infants to pass through a human woman's birth canal? There's a subplot about a âvolunteer womb corpsâ which quickly becomes essentially slavery as women are implanted with fertilized embryos harvested from existing stocks, or (if they have proven capable of bearing and survived) are artificially inseminated with frozen sperm stocks. Why? And if they're so important to the future of the human race, why does the shadowy theocracy keep them imprisoned instead of elevating them to nearly goddess-like status?
It just doesn't work.
And that's a shame, because there's a lot of good stuff here. The adventure of Cedar running and evading capture, the relationships she builds along the way, the recurrent Christian theme of Word made Flesh and how or whether that relates to the changes in the biosphere, Cedar's pregnancy journal which she keeps even when virtually everything else is abandoned so that she can hand something to her child once it is born, the family secrets that are revealed, the pushme-pullyou of Native versus White value systems and spirituality â this is all great material, but it really struggles to rise from the primordial ooze that just refuses to form a coherent matrix.
âThe first thing that happens at the end of the world is that we don't know what is happening,â one of her characters observes. The problem is, neither does the reader, and it's a flaw this ambitious work just can't overcome.
