Raising the Stones by Sheri S. Tepper
453 pages
Published 1990
Read from November 8 to November 16
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Tepper's Grass
was an ambitious but tremendously flawed novel, its potentially
interesting characters and storylines lost in a mess of Lifetime
melodrama and increasingly irrelevant and uninteresting secondary
characters. I was glad I read it, but equally glad to have it behind me
for good. Which was why I was a bit surprised to find myself thinking of
it a lot, and with fondness, a few weeks ago. I had grown
retrospectively fond of the world of Grass and its wider milieu, and I
was intrigued to follow the further implied adventures (spoilers, I guess)
of Marjorie Westriding and her alien companion as they portaled from
world to world throughout the galaxy. Beyond that, and a general sense that I
owed Tepper's oeuvre a third opportunity to impress after she came so
close with Grass, I had no idea what to expect from Raising the Stones.
Raising the Stones is a mess. But in what seems to be a developing pattern, it's an ambitious
mess, attempting to use the artifices of soft science fiction and space
opera to articulate the role and meaning of religion and gods in human
life. Nowhere is this theme handled with subtlety. Parts of it read like
a 16 year old atheist gleefully mocking the excesses and prejudices of
the worst elements of certain religions. One particular passage, not
much longer than a page, dove to such dismissive, reductionist depths --
characters suggest, in all seriousness, that religions based in
pastoralist economies evince a predisposition toward militancy and
fanaticism because the stock-raising lifestyle genetically favored
people for paranoia and distrust -- that I felt my appreciation for the
book as a whole plummet by like half a star. It's like, religious
fanatics already provide you with plenty to critique. You don't have to
resort to calling them genetic scum and implicating entire populations
(cough from the Middle East cough) in the results of historical
accident.
Other bits of Tepper's religious forays were more
interesting, or at least more entertaining. The pastoral fanatics, while
obviously meant to be proxies of hard-line Islam, were mixed with Boer
trappings, which suited the group's political history quite well. The
one mention of Marjorie Westriding's subsequent adventures segues into
one of the more genially amusing satires, as her message of bulk-rate
pantheistic humanism got distorted by religious scholars over the course
of a millennium, to the point where her followers can't cut their hair
or eat eggs or see psychologists.
And then, of course, you have
the giant underground fungal god. Complete with god spores and
brainwashed cats to bring it nourishment. Which a) was fuckin' awesome,
and b) was described with just enough troubling detail to leave you uneasy
after (spoilers) its final "victory."
The real problem with Raising the Stones
was the characters. There were too many of them, and the vast majority
of them were interchangeable bureaucrats whose pivotal scenes involved
meetings ripped from the opening chapters of a Crichton potboiler. I
only cared about a handful of characters, and they all received
criminally few pages of POV.
Yet I can't bring myself to dislike
this book. And even after two flawed entries, I find myself more intent
than ever on obtaining the final book of the trilogy: it is hinted, ever
so briefly, that Sam from this book -- who is now, finally, somewhat
interesting at the end -- will seek out Marjorie from Grass on
her pantheistic mission around the galaxy. While I expect to be
disappointed, for some reason I just gotta see what happens next.
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