Book Report: Califia’s Daughters

One of the last books I read in 2006 was Califia’s Daughters, which I had read two years ago or so, and more or less liked, although I had noticed that the pacing was seriously off. The first hundred and fifty pages or so are a leisurely introduction to the village and a few of its characters, and then we settle on a protagonist, and then she goes on a Quest, and is deflected, and so on, and so forth, and eventually she finds herself in a Predicament. Now, I would call the Predicament the nut of the book, the thing where our Protagonist has to use all her resources, including resources she isn’t sure she actually has, to get herself out and home again. And it doesn’t start until we’re more than three hundred pages into the book. And there’s a nice build-up for a hundred pages or so, and then some unfortunately brief Action!, and then suddenly the book is over. It’s thirty pages from the beginning of the Action! to the end of the book, including not only the Action! itself but the trip Home and the discovery that Home is different, and that the Protagonist is different, but that she is still, after all, Home.

Now, in a 500-page book (489 pages, actually), having a thirty-page dénouement is not necessarily a problem. I suspect that I have complained about overly long winding-up passages of far less than five percent of a book’s total. The problem is that this book starts out as the sort of book that really requires a long winding-up; the essential questions at the beginning of the book are ones of whether Home is, really, as it should be. And that sort of book that requires something a little more after the protagonist gets home.

More spoilerifically, in post-apocalypse California males are susceptible to some sort of immune-system thing which causes nine out of ten of them to die in infancy, or something. Anyway, there are ten women for every man. In the protagonist’s home, this means that men are coddled, kept from any sort of active behavior that makes the women uneasy about the potential for harm. They play no great role in the political life of the village, are given little responsibility, and are generally treated like, well, like women. You know, there is a point to the book. The village comes into contact with another village, resulting in our protagonist making a dangerous journey to that village to spy on things and setting up the plot of the book. She discovers that in that village, males are given a surprising (to her) amount of autonomy and risk. They are taught to fight, and to work, and to contribute to the community in various ways. Our protagonist does not spend any time in that village, for a variety of reasons, but resolves to advise her village leaders to reject their overtures, as further contact would be too unsettling to her own societal norms and mores.

Then, for good and sound and reader-pleasing reasons, she winds up in a third village, where men are kept in a gilded cage, made into slaves and prostitutes. Our Protagonist more or less frees the men, although she does so primarily as a tool for her own escape and Quest, and then flees the city and, eventually, comes home. And the book ends with her safe arrival. We do know that in her absence, the two villages have been interacting extensively, but we don’t get to find out what that does to her home. The whole question is simply ignored, as if all we wanted to know was whether our protagonist got home safely. And, what the heck, she does. But if that’s what we wanted to know, then she could have left the village on page thirty-five.

But what I set out to note in this note was the experience of rereading the book, knowing that it has that pacing flaw. I was surprised by how annoyed I was by it. The first time through, of course, I had no idea that it would have that flaw, and when I was twenty-five pages from the end, I suspected that the Predicament would come to a head and the book would end with our Protagonist clinging to a cliff’s edge, to be concluded in Califia’s Sons, next summer from Bantam wherever cheap paperbacks are sold. And that would have been annoying, too. But in rereading the book, knowing that it would be wound up, I was unable to really enjoy the interesting portrait of the world and the village, because I knew there would be no payoff.

Why was the knowledge that there would be no payoff that much worse than the knowledge of what the payoff would be, as is the general condition of rereading? I don’t know. Perhaps it was my own animus. Perhaps it was really some other aspect of the experience, bad light or indigestion or background stress, and I only interpreted the pacing as the problem. Or perhaps on balance, the book really wasn’t good enough to provide me with lots of pleasure to put me in the mood to make peace with its flaws. I’m not sure.

I am still surprised that the book didn’t sell better, or make more of a splash, particularly considering that the author (Leigh Richards) is a hugely best-selling mystery writer (under the name Laurie R. King) (you may have seen her mentioned here). I actually went into rereading the book expecting to make a Book Report about my continued perplexity concerning the reaction of the specfic readers and institutions to non-specfic authors ventures into specfic territory. But that wasn’t what happened.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.