Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper
412 pages
Published 1991
Read from April 9 to April 17
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
I don't know why I keep coming back to Tepper. Sideshow retroactively made her Arbai Trilogy seem much more tolerable than it was, which led to me pasting practically her entire bibliography into my to-read list. The Gate to Women's Country was a disappointment, but I expected better from Beauty: it's a fantasy novel, "drawing from the wellspring of much-loved, well-remembered fairy tales," which is kind of my thing, and it won a Locus award! And for the first 40 or 50 pages, I loved it. The narrator was a naive but peppery young medieval-fantasy heroine with colorfully dour aunts and a winsomely loquacious narrative voice. I confidently expected a light but entertaining read, something I could breeze through in a couple days and set down satisfied.
But then (spoilers, if you care) some no-shit time travelers appear just as the more overt fairy tale portion of Beauty's tale snaps into place, filming a documentary on the loss of magic from the world, and abduct Beauty into the 21st century. There Tepper constructs a rote, absurd (intentionally so?) dystopia dominated by "Fidipur," a corruption (phonetically and ideologically) of "Feed the Poor," which houses humanity in tiny cubicles to save space for algal nutrition vats. No one goes hungry, thanks to the algal wafers allotted to everyone, but beauty (get it yet?) is gone from the world; there is even a heartfelt documentary on the uprooting and consumption of the globe's final radish. Naturally one of Beauty's abductors is a psychopath -- a psycho killer rapist being pretty much required by law in fiction of the '80s and '90s. And naturally Fidipur maintains a fleet of time machines charged with just enough technobabble and plot convenience to get Beauty and her disaffected abductors into the scarcely less dystopian world of 1991.
I think I find myself at cross-purposes with Tepper whenever I read her. The book I want to read based on the description is (with the exception of Sideshow) not the book Tepper decided to write. In this period of her career she was an Ideas Writer, using genre as a scaffold for big, clumsy, ultimately unsupportable analogies and commentaries on society, which collapse the story under awkward weight. I think Tepper's basic conceit -- that Sleeping Beauty is, well, beauty, and must sleep through these latter ages of the world in order to outlive them -- is workable. But all this crap about Fidipur and 1991 and psycho killers as agents of literal personified evil was, well, crap. There was zero purpose to any of it except for Beauty (the character) to tut and cluck and be Tepper's mouthpiece, soapboxing about the evils of patriarchal religion, "fetus worship," environmental degradation, horror writers, and her kids-on-my-lawn distaste for popular culture circa 1991. I even agree with her opinions on those first three evils, but the whole book is such a naked rant against the author's pet peeves that it becomes hard to take it seriously. Why a supposedly feminist author would have a woman from the literal middle ages recoil from America's treatment of women in 1991, for instance, escapes understanding. Someone took the m'lady romantic crap a little too seriously.
As a document of socially engaged genre fiction in the early '90s, Beauty is interesting. Some passages set in Faery or Beauty's sanitized 1400s were engrossing enough to offset -- a little -- the terrible time travel and psycho killer material. As a work of fiction, however, it may have put me off Tepper for a while.
No matter -- there are plenty of other authors I've longed to check out.
No comments:
Post a Comment