Critique

I've been reading Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy. The first book was depressing - it's set in a near-future distopia where women are legally minors - but pretty darn good, I thought. The second book was longer, more scattered. It felt like the middle book of a trilogy. Then I got to the third book, in which the author loses her mind. Books one and two are about women fighting the power as best they can in a world almost like our own. The third book opens with a new character having a visionquest vision of the now-dead lead character of book one, followed by the revelation that human beings don't need food, but can live on music. No, seriously. There's a middle section that goes skipping about through the next few centuries, and reads like sketches for a bunch of short stories that don't quite all belong in the same universe. Then a denoument in which it is finally brought to the attention of the men "in charge" that a significant portion of the population has stopped consuming food. I am strongly reminded of Margaret Murray's theory that many if not most people in medieval Europe weren't actually Catholics. If there were that many not-Catholics, why did they let the Church run everything? Makes no sense.

It's like she couldn't figure out how to end the trilogy she'd started, so she swapped in the end of some other saga and hoped readers wouldn't notice.


Today's earrings: flies, crows

Bedtime reading: Earthsong, Suzette Haden Elgin