Dreams of the Sea | |||||
Élisabeth Vonarburg | |||||
Tesseract Books/Hades Publications, 291 pages | |||||
A review by Donna McMahon
A large expedition from Earth is in the process of settling Alpha, a planet orbiting Altair, when disaster strikes. As its
twin planet eclipses the sun, a mysterious blue "sea" of mist rises, covering all the low lying areas of the continents. None
of the colonists submerged by the sea survive, and those on higher land find that a mysterious force is neutralizing all
electrical energy, and the technology they depend upon suddenly doesn't work. Without flyers they cannot even evacuate to
their ship in orbit.
Now that it's too late, the surviving colonists understand why the ruins of a long dead civilization show that the ancients
fled their coastlines and rebuilt on the uplands. But this doesn't explain why they eventually abandoned all their
cities -- as if every inhabitant simply got up one day and left. Even as the humans struggle to survive and reshape this
planet to their needs, a few colonists search for answers to the mystery of their alien predecessors.
Meanwhile, an alien dreamer, Eilai, dreams of the future and the past. She dreams of her own people and their relationship
with the sea, but she also dreams through the eyes of humans who will come and settle her world.
Élisabeth Vonarburg (who writes in French) comes at her fiction with a distinctly European sensibility -- in naming conventions,
character backgrounds, and social attitudes. This is refreshing for the English reader, and her alien culture is also
well thought out. The atmospheric abandoned cities of Alpha reminded me a little of Ray Bradbury, and Eilai's journey
through the ancient lands made me think of Ursula K. Le Guin.
Dreams of the Sea has no straightforward story problem or plot thread; instead it is a complexly braided narrative
involving dozens of characters of two different races in timelines that jump back and forth by years, decades and
centuries. Frankly, I couldn't keep it all straight and eventually I lost patience with trying. The closest thing to a
protagonist is Eilai, the dreamer, but she dreams through so many different eyes that her own story is almost submerged in the mix.
The colonists' initial stranding (which, I notice, is the easiest plot thread to summarize for purposes of reviews or cover
blurbs) is not treated in a conventional SF manner, to put it mildly. Vonarburg offers few details of human technology or
the alien ecosystem, or indeed, of anything that's generally assumed as an integral part of world building. The author
seems to have no interest in science (abstract or applied, human or alien) and uses it only in the vaguest way. Not only
don't we hear any details about how the humans survive on this new world, but their impractical behaviour makes it hard
to swallow that they would survive at all.
This novel is all about metaphor. That's fine, but as a reader I wanted the surface story to succeed, and it didn't work
for me because I was constantly jarred by ridiculous details. For example, nobody who was scrabbling to survive with minimal
supplies on an alien planet would have the time and equipment -- never mind the inclination -- to weave bed sheets!
Moreover, most of the characters are intellectuals -- passive, obsessively introspective and emotionally distant (if not
downright depressed) -- so I found it hard to care about them and their relationships or to get excited by scene after
scene of people pontificating at gatherings reminiscent of tedious faculty parties, or going for long brooding walks.
Which isn't to say that Vonarburg can't write characters. She does a fine job, for example, with Tige, a poor young man
from a miners' family who is trying to become an urban success against huge odds. Vonarburg catches his awkward balance
of passion, ambition, uncertainty, anger, and fear, and even moves successfully between two versions of the young Tige
and his middle-aged self.
Literary readers won't be bothered by the SFnal lapses, the narrative complexity, or the lack of resolution of almost
everything. They'll enjoy the imagery and the writing style and probably have great fun probing the hidden depths of
Vonarburg's sea dreams.
Genre readers, on the other hand, are likely to find this novel slow, talky, confusing, and desperately lacking in
scientific and logistical credibility. It opens with a crisis of great dramatic potential which is then utterly
ignored. Heck, we don't even see these stranded colonists trying to survive on a strangely haunting alien
world. Instead, most of the action takes place offstage and they talk about it later. Argh!
Donna McMahon discovered science fiction in high school and fandom in 1977, and never recovered. Dance of Knives, her first novel, was published by Tor in May, 2001, and her book reviews won an Aurora Award the same month. She likes to review books first as a reader (Was this a Good Read? Did I get my money's worth?) and second as a writer (What makes this book succeed/fail as a genre novel?). You can visit her website at http://www.donna-mcmahon.com/. |
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