By Barbara G. Walker
Not Read: Feb 2010
Rating: *zones out*
I’m trying to be good, really I am. But 50 pages out of 170 isn’t such a bad run…
The book is awkward and boring and it reads like what it is–a work of fiction by a feminist scholar that has been described (by The Northwest Gay and Lesbian Reader, no less) as a parable.
OH DEAR DEITY MAKE IT STOP.
This poor little volume commits every sin a scholarly writer is capable of. Information dump. Stepping out of character. Having a really boring character. Using your character as a vehicle and not as an actual person. That last is what smarts the worst, as the whole point of the book is to demonstrate how modern life marginalizes women. Walker has marginalized Antiope, her narrator, by making her void of emotion and completely unconvincing as either a warrior woman or a time traveler.
*deep breath*
Antiope is an Amazon, in the ancient past. Their precise location is not mentioned, we only know what they have to fight off Greeks periodically. (Damn those Greeks, they wind up everywhere, amirite?) What we do get is a shitload of detail (most of which I suspect to be conjecture) about the way the Amazons live. Women are dominant, they worship a mother goddess, etc. The book begins when Antiope makes her first kill, a rite of passage for women in this society. She goes to the sacred mountain for the required ritual–three days of fasting in the ‘womb’ of the mountain. (And, wow, they really trick that space out to look and feel like a womb. I admit, I squirmed at the description of red-dyed fleece lining everything.) She sinks into the sort of meditative trance these things are known for, and loses track of time.
She comes to next to an airport runway, with planes barreling past. On the other side is a highway. Because this is a book about how patriarchy sucks, her first modern encounter is with a carload of assholes who decide they want to rape her there on the side of the road. She may be naked but she still has her sword, and she chops off one guy’s fingers, which sends them packing. The next person to pull over is a kindly middle-aged woman named Diana (yes, Diana), who takes her in.
Antiope apparently has a gift for learning. Though she doesn’t understand English, her narrative copies out exactly what people say to her in those first moments. More understandably, she relies on a method she calls ‘thought sensing’ to try to understand the intent of the speaker, rather than the words themselves. Credibility for this flies out the window when it becomes clear that Antiope is actually sensing thought images, not just reading body language and tone of voice. She picks up English fairly readily, and soon she and Diana are trying to explain how different their cultures are.
Infodump, infodump, infodump, these people live in physical comfort but are always anxious and deny their sensuality, infodump… Oh, right, the almost-rapists above shot her in the thigh. Diana enlists her doctor nephew to bandage Antiope up, which he does. Then one day he stops by to check on her while Diana is out. Antiope has already had several discussions with Diana about their views of nudity and sexuality (including a botched gesture to have sex with Diana since she’s so lonely… yeah, fail), but Antiope is feeling “sexually inflammable” so she starts feeling up the nephew. This has got to be set in the 50s (or a book by a feminist scholar), as a little dick squeezing is all it takes to get him to forget his wife and start having sex with her. He comes inside her, which Antiope considers highly offensive, so she shoves him off her. “I invited you to love, not begin child!” When Diana finds out about this, she doesn’t seem too worried that this could, in fact, happen, and just advises Antiope to never let on to the nephew’s wife. DUBLEYATIEFF, GUYS.
I stopped reading shortly after that. I’m just not interested. It’s not interesting. It’s fucking predictable. Men bad, modern life bad, Amazons awesome if brutal. Antiope comes from a world with no academia but she speaks like one.
Oh, oh, speaking of speech, this is the most awkward dialogue! Diana, on finding a naked, bloodied, sword-toting young woman with a bullet her thigh on the side of the road:
“All right, calm down. No hospital. You seem to understand that word at least. I must say you’ve got me curious. It’s not every day I find a pretty young woman on the roadside, wearing nothing but a little leather bag and an odd-looking old sword, speaking no English, and bleeding from a hole in her leg. There’s a dandy story in you, and I’d like to know it. So we’ll go to my place. I can get you taken care of there. We’ll go to Diana’s house for a little while, OK?”
THAT IS NOT A NORMAL REACTION. Who talks like that?! No one! No one in the history of the world talks like that! Diana sounds like she stepped out of an old movie, the kind where people say things in ‘clever’ ways for no damn reason.
I am a feminist and I want to shake this woman. This isn’t how you demonstrate sweeping criticism of society. You don’t keep hammering your one point home over and over again–and you don’t use a lot of bullshit conjecture to do it with.
The Amazons are still, largely, myth. There’s some evidence, but very little.
All this stuff about mother worship? Blown out of proportion by people who want to get as far from patriarchal systems as possible. I believe there was mother worship. I don’t believe it was a big deal to the people who lived it as normal. Antiope, shut the fuck up about it when you’re there in the past, living it. IT’S NORMAL. People who have no concept of anything else don’t walk around going, “We are the sisterhood, we are all about womanly empowerment, women are AWESOME!” They just DO IT.
Lessons learned:
- Academics should not write fiction.
- Do no try to criticize with a bludgeon. Use a scalpel.
- Feminists have a bad name because some feminists fucking suck at getting their message across.
God damn it.
Chalk this up as another defeat for Amazon fiction. Steven Pressfield’s Last of the Amazons was also an infodumping, stale mess. And Queen of the Amazons was set more outside the Amazon culture than in it.
WHERE CAN I GET GOOD AMAZON FICTION!?
Anyone…?
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