2014 read #27: The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper.

The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper
278 pages
Published 1988
Read from February 26 to March 15
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Spoilers ahead.

After a nuclear war devastates the globe, survivors gather under a leader named Martha Evesdaughter to build a new society, a better society, where indiscriminate war and the male lust for glory and domination and ownership will be bred out of the species, even if it takes a thousand years. Men are kept in garrisons, armed with Bronze Age technology, fed a cult of personal honor and duty and one-on-one combat, but given the chance to return to Women's Country should they choose. These less violent males become breeding stock, leading over many generations to brilliant, psychic empaths and clairvoyants, while the garrison males are told they are the sires of the "warriors' sons" birthed after every conjugal carnival, but they really aren't. And the breeding males and the ruling females can actually defend themselves, because they have like crazy ninja skills and weapons in addition to the clairvoyant empathy thing, so the warrior males are totally expendable. Got all that?

Allegorical novels can fall apart if the allegory doesn't grab the reader. Certainly the world didn't grab me, set up as it was solely to sustain the allegory. The characters could have been interesting if they hadn't all been making stupid, stubborn decisions because the plot needed them to. But the allegory here was the main thing, and it didn't work for me at all. For one thing, what was the allegorical meaning? That male-dominated societies suck, that men have all too often treated women as chattel and possessions, that honor and glory breed machismo and disrespect for women? All valid points, but even in 1988 I think you would have needed something more to bulk up your novel. Women's Country felt insubstantial -- and, worst of all, it was boring.

Tepper hints at the role of the Campbellian hero's quest as a male empowerment fantasy and a rationale for misogynistic behavior, a theme she would treat in great detail in Raising the Stones, but in neither book does she develop that thesis to any satisfactory conclusion. (Another thing she revisits in Sideshow is the caricature of the god-fearin' patriarchal society, which feels like a protracted detour in this book and led to a less than satisfying climax. Not elegant plotting.) The whole "breeding the violence out of the men" thing was some half-baked anthropology -- violence, cooperation, and empathy are largely modulated by culture, so I couldn't stop thinking how stupid it was to let the warrior males raise all the male children from age 5 on, Sparta style, if you wanted to set up a peaceful matriarchal society.