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I read this when it first came out; please correct and forgive inaccuracies of memory. (Appropriate to the story!)
Patricia, an Alzheimer's patient, is in a nursing home. The nurses think that she recalls living two completely different lives (and is slipping between realities now) because she has dementia; we, the readers, know that she's recalling alternate timelines.
In 1949, she agreed to a marriage proposal, or not. The woman who agreed became Trish, trapped in a miserably abusive marriage... but also living in the best possible world as far as the general good is concerned, with peace, prosperity, and a moon base. The woman who declined became Pat, who falls in love with a woman, travels, and has a life full of love and self-fulfillment... in a world that slides into nightmarish total war, and seems to headed straight for Armageddon.
Though there are plenty of full scenes with dialogue and so forth, there's also a lot of summary narration. This works surprisingly well; my interest only flagged in the last fifth or so, when I started losing track of the multiplicity of alternate children and grandchildren and their significant others. It's a book about two largely mundane lives that inexplicably has the narrative grip of a thriller. I credit Walton's writing skill for this, and I'm still not sure how she did it. Between the depressingness and the summarizing, by all rights I should have bounced off this book rather than reading it in a day.
I didn't write about the book till now because I had such mixed feelings about it. Artistically, it's very well-done - an unusual use of tell-not-show that succeeds in (mostly) being compelling reading. However, I also found it excruciatingly depressing. It deals centrally with five of my top ten most depressing subjects: Alzheimer's disease, agonizing death by cancer, nuclear war, domestic violence and emotional abuse, and being consigned in a nursing home where you're helpless and mistreated and cut off from everything that makes life bearable.
Regarding the alternate timelines, the ending strongly implied that it was Patricia's choice of who to marry that led to sweeping changes between the timelines. I assume it was a "butterfly effect" in which she made one small change that led to several other small changes that ended up having a gigantic domino effect, but I would have liked to be able to see some of how that happened. I couldn't figure out what it was she did that was important. If I recall correctly, history started changing in big ways right after she either got married or didn't. Trish did get involved in political volunteering, but if I recall correctly, history had already changed at that point. Am I misremembering when history started to change, and it was the volunteering after all? Or was there some other crucial action that I missed?
Patricia, an Alzheimer's patient, is in a nursing home. The nurses think that she recalls living two completely different lives (and is slipping between realities now) because she has dementia; we, the readers, know that she's recalling alternate timelines.
In 1949, she agreed to a marriage proposal, or not. The woman who agreed became Trish, trapped in a miserably abusive marriage... but also living in the best possible world as far as the general good is concerned, with peace, prosperity, and a moon base. The woman who declined became Pat, who falls in love with a woman, travels, and has a life full of love and self-fulfillment... in a world that slides into nightmarish total war, and seems to headed straight for Armageddon.
Though there are plenty of full scenes with dialogue and so forth, there's also a lot of summary narration. This works surprisingly well; my interest only flagged in the last fifth or so, when I started losing track of the multiplicity of alternate children and grandchildren and their significant others. It's a book about two largely mundane lives that inexplicably has the narrative grip of a thriller. I credit Walton's writing skill for this, and I'm still not sure how she did it. Between the depressingness and the summarizing, by all rights I should have bounced off this book rather than reading it in a day.
I didn't write about the book till now because I had such mixed feelings about it. Artistically, it's very well-done - an unusual use of tell-not-show that succeeds in (mostly) being compelling reading. However, I also found it excruciatingly depressing. It deals centrally with five of my top ten most depressing subjects: Alzheimer's disease, agonizing death by cancer, nuclear war, domestic violence and emotional abuse, and being consigned in a nursing home where you're helpless and mistreated and cut off from everything that makes life bearable.
Regarding the alternate timelines, the ending strongly implied that it was Patricia's choice of who to marry that led to sweeping changes between the timelines. I assume it was a "butterfly effect" in which she made one small change that led to several other small changes that ended up having a gigantic domino effect, but I would have liked to be able to see some of how that happened. I couldn't figure out what it was she did that was important. If I recall correctly, history started changing in big ways right after she either got married or didn't. Trish did get involved in political volunteering, but if I recall correctly, history had already changed at that point. Am I misremembering when history started to change, and it was the volunteering after all? Or was there some other crucial action that I missed?
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Just wow, hello, if it's implied she CAUSED the difference, problematic subtext ahoy.
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Just, in a world where we LITERALLY HAVE people claiming that same sex relationships and women seeking agency and fulfillment are ruining everything, I find as is a lot more distressing than the idea that a woman's relationship choices don't have much effect on the world.
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The reason this story works on an emotional level is that its intent is to generate tension by creating a difficult choice, not to send a message about how to make the world a better place, which would be a different story.
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The lesbian relationship may be so much more wonderfully perfect - but if Patricia's choices and actions are causal, it's still the reason the world goes to hell, and that just makes that moreso. =\
Without the sexuality issues, that's already kind of . . . horrific to me as someone who has a problem with obsessive rumination on the idea that everything I do to make myself happy is evil, poisonous and making the world a worse place. Add in "oh by the way, it's an f/f relationship path that damns the world" and I'm not really comfortable with that subtext at all.
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But this particular combination of them, in conjunction with "happy f/f vs unhappy m/f" is giving me, as a bisexual person with a lot of similar issues to the ones you describe, the wiggins. Just me personally! It sounds like a really well-done book but I don't think I could get past that aspect to fully enjoy it. (It would be hard enough if it was happy het vs miserable het, but this way is even more stressful.)
(Thank you for the review, though, Rachel--I'd heard this title before but wasn't sure what it was about! Now I know, and must remember to pick up another Jo Walton book soon. She's great.)
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You write that Pat travels as part of her fulfilling, happy life. I was thinking just the other day about how many women say they would travel if they could do anything they wanted to: how travel, the freedom and the wherewithal to travel wherever one wishes to go, is viewed as such an ideal and nearly unattainable thing by women.
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I am very fortunate to have been able to afford to travel.
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What I mean is, that when I talk to men and women who do not have the wherewithal or the time to travel, about what they would do if they could do anything, more women than men tend to wish for travel. And often to very specific places.
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that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Though I'd have to think further to make more of a case.
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This was exactly my reaction! I also agree that I would have found a connect-the-dots of cause and effect to be more intellectually satisfying, though I agree with
The nurses think that she recalls living two completely different lives (and is slipping between realities now) because she has dementia; we, the readers, know that she's recalling alternate timelines.
This reader embraces the freedom to attribute both My Real Children and Among Others to the delusions of the protagonists.
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I forgot to mention, I had exactly this experience too.
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tl;dr version: going through your life believing that anything you do could magically doom or save the entire world in ways that have no causal connection to that actions themselves will really fuck you up.
Walton herself showed up in the comments to comment that she does live her life that way (specifically, she said she lives as if each choice is simultaneously world-changing and insignificant), and it doesn't fuck her up, it makes her happy. So.
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You know, I'm really wondering about the butterfly effect, now. It's a fun theory but there are an AWFUL LOT of butterflies out there. Who is there to trace the path and measure the influence of each and every butterfly? The protagonist of this book may have done or failed to do X, Y, or Z, but what about all the other people in the world, doing similar. She alone is the the fulcrum on which the world tips?
Is it really implied in the book that it comes down to her?
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Like I'm not saying the book is Evol or anything: just that my gut reaction to the ideas being presented is EUGHWHAT? NO THANK YOU.
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I feel the same way.
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Nota bene: I'm not a mathematician, but my B.A. is in math and I'm familiar with the basics.
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Laid out that way, it's very difficult for me to want to read a novel where choosing a healthy lesbian relationship over an abusive straight marriage apparently blows up the world. I am sure it is more nuanced in practice, but it's not like I don't have enough depressing lesbian fiction already available to me if I want it (which I don't) without adding that extra layer.
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I see what you're saying, and I don't want to sound like I'm arguing. In the book, though, while obviously there are unfortunate implications overall, the lesbian relationship is portrayed as positive and idyllic - if anything, the subtext is "lesbian relationships are awesome, straight relationships suck." I totally see why it comes across very badly in my review, but the book overall gave me the opposite message.
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Understood. I have not read the book and I am not trying to argue that it renders any general judgment on queer relationships versus straight ones. In the abstract, I don't think it helps me to know that the relationship is portrayed positively if the choosing of that relationship is still causally linked to the destruction of the wider world, while suffering through the horrible relationship is the thing that makes the world better. I understand that if the point of the narrative is the rising and falling counterpoint of happiness, there may have been no unproblematic (or -unpleasant) way to write the novel, but I still don't want to read it, however inadvertently or unintentionally it may be reinforcing philosophies I don't agree with/believe in.
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Crazy that in both realities--both the one where she's happy and the one where she's miserable--she ends up in a nursing home. "Wars may come and wars may go; peace may flourish and people may colonize the moon... but you're going to end up in a nursing home either way." ... That's a minor thing to fixate on, and I know it's necessary for the story to have her end up there, but still.
Conceptually, I have a problem being shown [just] two realities because it makes it seem as if they're the only two possibilities (which has knock-on implications) for how events could go... from a storytelling perspective, though, I can see how two would be about all you could do if you were going to go in depth. But I do see how it could lead to a tendency to link all the elements causally even if there's no causation.
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The Alzheimer's is genetic - her mother also gets it. So that's inescapable unless she dies of something else first. (SO DEPRESSING.)
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(and we're icon twins--fraternal rather than identical, but still: high fives!)
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You should perhaps tag this one under "awesomely depressing books." Even if it's a good awesomely depressing book, I'm just impressed.
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Someone's theory was that one of those students, encouraged, went on to do something important.
The lesbian relationship began quite a few years later.
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This part is not science fiction -- the point is not how this happened or the mechanism allowing her the choice. The point a fantasy moral decision: how should she decide -- for personal happiness or guessing at global perspectives? I found it a powerful ending, and I liked that it never catered to my science fictional curiosity about how it worked.
I didn't find the lives quite as depressing as Rachel -- yes, bad stuff happened in both, but so did good stuff. Yes, she ended up with Alzheimers in both, but I don't think dying with Alzheimers means that the rest of your life is now meaningless. Obviously, anyone who any of this problematic doesn't have to read the book. There's a time and place for all strong literature, and no one has to read all the books, not even all the "good" books. However, Walton's work is complex enough that it's hard to talk about the book without having read it -- it's not a simple case of lesbians=good or tolerance=nuclear war. It's more about people making choices, and the difference those choices make. And then the what-if about the final choice.
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