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April 13th, 2008
08:56 am - The Carhullan Army
I just finished The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall. It's in a recognisable tradition of feminist SF, I'm thinking 'Woman at the Edge of Time', 'Walk to the End of the World', 'The Handmaid's Tale'. It reflects and develops this line, rather than simply appending to it. It's well written. The end seems a bit rushed. It's set in England (Cumbria) about twenty or thirty years from now, after an environmental and political collapse. Most people are serfs, without rights, confined to the decaying towns, and women are forcibly fitted with coils. What is most noticeable about the society is that it doesn't work properly, even within the context of the environmental collapse. That is, the Authority doesn't give people allotments to grow veg, and set up wind farms. It just sits there being utterly incompetent.
A woman walks out of Penrith and disappears into the surrounding fells to live with a group of outlaw women living a self-sufficient lifestyle in an old farm, called Carhullan. In contrast to the Authority, these women are markedly competent. But the situation is complex.
On arriving at Carhullan, our protagonist is subject to quite extreme cult-like de-personalisation techniques, followed by lovey-dovey inclusion: classic brainwashing of an already vulnerable mind. From then on, therefore, she is a very unreliable narrator.
Carhullan reminded me of Efrafa in Watership Down, and Jackie Nixon the leader reminded me of General Woundwort. It's an effective society, but I think it is one which has already gone wrong before the story begins. During the story it gets worse, as Jackie goes insane.
At first I was very annoyed with the book, like some readers of Harry Potter I was 'What do you mean, presenting this as a Utopia, it's clearly fucked up!' Then I realised that this surely was the point, as it must be in Potter.
On the surface this is a lesbian feminist wholefood collective. One scratch under the surface the ostensible values of this book are conservative: reminiscent of Heinlein, or perhaps Cecelia Holland (libertarian feminist SF Floating Worlds - recommended). But what is under that?
Towards the end of the book, Jackie announces that secret government broadcasts, which she alone has managed to intercept, tell her the farm is about to be attacked by the Authority. Therefore they have to disband the farm, abandon subsistence, and turn into a guerilla army. So about fifty competent women take on the incompetent masculine State. I was wondering how Sarah Hall was going to resolve the situation.
Would the values and approach of Carhullan be endorsed or undermined? Would Jackie be proved right, and all her ruthlessness (up to murdering dissidents) be justified? Or would the government threat be proved delusional: the personal power which allowed her to establish the farm, also tearing it apart for no reason?
But this was not resolved. The story ends on perhaps a note of optimism. Jackie's quixotic assault on the Authority obviously fails, but it may have demonstrated to the serfs that revolt is possible. The idea of the farm might be kept alive. Or it might be that there is no future. This reminds me of 1984 'If there is any hope it is with the proles'.
ETA - Verdict: Easy and quick to read because so well written. Emotionally engaging, although bits upset me so much I had to put the book aside occasionally. Rushed conclusion, and unresolved ambiguity of values, which you may or may not like. More complex than it superficially appears. A sophisticated SF story, in the sense that the author is developing or challenging established SF ideas.
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Comments:
The story ends on perhaps a note of optimism.I am really, really interested in how people react to the end of this book. About half the time they seem to think it's depressing, but I'm with you -- I think it's optimistic (it's a document recovered from the Authority, not in the possession of the Authority, after all). Also, be interested in what you make of Adam Roberts' take.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/57902677/399125) | | From: | ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ajr |
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| Date: | April 13th, 2008 09:58 am (UTC) |
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I can see how people may find the ending depressing - the Carhullan army gets quashed, after all - but I think there's enough there to argue for optimism. First, in the fact they lasted fifty-odd days, and the message is there that they hope others will take heart from their feat and rise up too. The other thing is the way the novel is presented, as you say. The implication is that the Authority has fallen, and this document has been found in the ruins, so it's a history, in a sense. Another take on the book can be found at Strange Horizons. With Roberts' I can see how he got what he did from the book, though I would disagree with him (the fact I haven't read any of Hall's other books may be a factor), while the review at Strange Horizon's is country miles away from my own understanding of the book.
Both Handmaid's Tale and 1984 are read within a frame that they are relics from a time that has passed. This too perhaps.
| | From: | ajr |
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| Date: | April 13th, 2008 10:09 am (UTC) |
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Yes; indeed, it's fair to say that most of the time I spent reading the Carhullan Army, I was thinking how strongly it followed much the same model as The Handmaid's tale.
BTW I thought the Strange Horizons review had some flaws (Sister does have sex with men after she joins the collective for instance) but I agree with this:
the inevitable irony of Carhullan's insurgency, and of Sister's membership of its "army," is that it leads her to repress others against their will, and even to kill in her turn. She becomes party to another administration of terror, and a willing subject of a dictatorial regime. Whether this terror, driven by Jackie's autocratic paranoia, is necessary or justifiable is left unanswered
This is the key insight, I think: the whole story is ironic. I can't understand how Adam Roberts missed that - he does it all the time himself.
I thought I'd left a comment on that SH review. Where is it?
I mentioned the error you pointed out and also said something about the fact her partner is aroused by the violation her when she has the coil put in.
It is one of the best books I've read this year, I wrote briefly about it on my LJ earlier in the year.
No idea. I certainly haven't been emailed a comment by you, and there's nothing in the reviews spam filter.
This was a couple of months ago.
Sure, but I've started to look out for your comments on old reviews, so I would have thought I'd remember it.
there’s no irony, no intertextual self-knowledge in the foresquare representation of how hard life in this imagined world necessarily is. Hall plays no games with the genuineness or essential reliability of her first-person narrator.
What? That's so wrong. No wonder he finds it relentless if he thinks it has a single voice - every event is double-sided. When The protagonist stares at the dissident's foot 'until it becomes an object, not human' that's not supposed to be reliable genuine insight, it's an indication of how screwed up she is. The killing of the dissidents is supposed to undermine the whole value system of the collective. Tsk, how could he miss that.
we are told: ‘it is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most that will conquer’ [158]—one of the most monstrously wrongheaded things I have read in a novel for a long time.
That's the whole point - it seems to me. We aren't told it by the author, Jackie asserts it, but what does she mean by it, and why does she say it?
Edited at 2008-04-13 10:04 am (UTC)
Maybe the decision to move to violent revolution/resistance always looks "insane" in some aspects and yet... I also found it heartening.
& refreshing as so many lesbian goat farm feministsf books end with a feeling of mystical crystal non violence that in my mind is not an answer.
I am looking forward to the last Marq'ssan book to see where those alien collective intelligences end up on the violent/nonviolent spectrum.
Yes. I think there is a suggestion that perhaps the insane fascist military response is the only thing that will work, and it takes a mad woman to forge that army. Actually there's a similar theme to The Anvil of Stars by Greg bear, though that's a male fascist figure in a space ship.
I agree that it's nice that the feminist collective don't overthrow the government by the power of crystals and hugs. On the other hand they don't overthrow them with armed warfare either :-/
Yes, yes I loved that about it too. Sure, by the end of the book I'd written Sister off as a cultist look but I can't deny a thrill of excitement when she described how liberating it was to not be treated as a deviant for her "rougher" inclinations. I thought that was one of the central questions the book asked -- when a formerly democratic society has devolved into an authoritarian system how best to end it, "nice" way or "bad" way? The latter is probably more ruthlessly effective but once you get used to doing it that way, say if the Carhullans had succeeded (and I think if they had more members and equivalent fire power, not so implausible a scenario) would they have managed things any better considering how things within the group had progressed? Incidentally, communicator, I wrote a review of the book for Open Letters Monthly - http://openlettersmonthly.com/issue/april08-sisters-in-arms/
Thanks for that link. I think the book has struck you in a similar way. Interesting to see the comment from Liz, that there is bound to be Carhullan Army fanfic, to fill in the elisions to the satisfaction of different readers. I wonder if that will happen?
Hello! Found my way here from Torque Control.
I have read all of Hall's novels and completely disagree with Robert's position but he has a far kinder judgement of Hall's previous efforts than I do. I think The Carhullan Army arguably better than her first (which was damn good) and leagues above her disastrous second.
I do not think that Sister is an unreliable narrator in the typical ie she skews events to make herself and Carhullan look good. That was Hall's stroke of genius, I thought, in making Sister so sure of the legitimacy of Carhullan's efforts that she laid everything bare, nasty tactics and all; if we got the same story from Jackie I'm sure she'd have selective amnesia. It's her judgement that's questionable, one we get to contrast with the reaction of other members like her lover and Chloe.
I see what you mean; she's unreliable in respect of her judgement of meaning and value, but what she describes actually happens. So in that respect she's reliable. Every scene has two meanings, but the actual scenes did happen.
I don't know Sarah Hall's other work. If I did I might feel differently about this one perhaps. It might seem less ambivalent if it sits in a predictable relationship to her other stuff.
The only thing I could consider "predictable" about it, in that sense, is the book's vibrant type of feminism. She writes strong female characters sure of their worth in times that were less certain -- her first book was set in 1936, the second early 20th C before WWI. I do think that Hall finds it exhilarating to create female characters who don't necessarily dovetail with conventional ideas of femininity like in Carhullan -- the idea that there is a violent core in all regardless of sex and that it can be stoked in women as well as in men, in this case to extremes.
This is what made the book complex for me: the good ideas that got mixed with and eventually overwhelmed by less august ones, in this case Jackie's conservative and brutal militancy.
-Imani
I read this post with half an eye because I haven't read The Carhullan Army yet - but I did find a nice s/h copy of the Cecilia Holland on Charing X Road yesterday. Thanks for the rec.
aha - I wonder what you'll think of it, it is very much an SF book of the seventies, and its politics date back to then there wasn't such a rift between anarcho-socialism and libertarian-republicanism as there is today
"'What do you mean, presenting this as a Utopia, it's clearly fucked up!' Then I realised that this surely was the point, as it must be in Potter."
Oh, so glad you said that. Sometimes I wonder at people who don't get that about the Harry Potter books! |
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