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blatherskite[Reposted from a book review in the F&SF forum]
Just finished James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter, now more than 20 years old, and find myself deeply conflicted about the book. Also more than a bit amused, since I've had this one in the "to read" pile for a great many months and hadn't noticed that it bubbled to the top of the pile less than a week before Christmas. Life has its entertaining serendipities...
Synopsis: As the title suggests, the story is about the modern-day sister of Jesus, begotten via a sperm bank and its experimental artificial womb. Whether by miracle or accident of biology, one of the donated sperm turns into a viable embryo and commences to growing into a female baby, later dubbed Julie by the paternal sperm donor, who rescues her and her mechawomb from the sperm bank just before it is blown apart by religious extremists. The rest of the tale describes Julie's grappling with her godhead (which is real and literal) and her mortality, as she retraces Christ's path to a modern Golgotha and what comes afterwards.
Let's start with the best parts. The writing is (you should pardon the wording) immaculate: it's clean, clear, effective, and at times gripping, and jerked an inadvertent tear or two from me by the end of the novel, which I won't spoil for you -- though given the context, you can probably infer much of what happens. I *liked* Julie. The text is salted with ironies and with jokes that range from the obvious but still funny (Pontius Pilate and his inferred co-Pilate, Satan as a vegetarian), clearly delivered as a chortle shared with the smirking author, to the painfully funny lines delivered with a completely straight face. Morrow does a sometimes remarkable job of capturing the essence of humanity struggling with an apparently hostile universe, and sometimes you just have to laugh because the alternative is tears and despair.
Then there are the less-good parts: The villains of the story are not even two-dimensionally evil; they're simply one-dimensional deranged morons. While I have some sympathy for this portrayal of religious extremists, it fails to satisfy me from a literary perspective. It feels clumsy, as if Morrow was pandering to the stereotypical agnostic/atheist SF reader rather than seriously exploring why people fall into this kind of belief system. There's enough sympathy-free venom here that it would take a whole nation of snakes to contain it. Ironically, Morrow ends up casting a similarly jaundiced eye upon the very readers he's pandering to. This may have been intentional; he's smart and skillful enough to weave this additional thread into an already rich tapestry. Though it felt like an unintended irony, it may also have been a clever and subtle reminder to readers that we too are not immune from foolish beliefs.
Another problem is that much of the plot is what has been called an "idiot plot", moving along by requiring decisions by the protagonist and other characters that even most idiots would never make. That makes the plot feel manipulative, which was disappointing, because I felt that Morrow did much subtler and more nuanced job of covering a similar topic in The Last Witchfinder. Although (obviously) a large suspension of disbelief is necessary to accept the plot premise and what follows, there are some egregious errors relating to a failure to follow through on certain obvious implications. For example, for reasons I won't go into, Julie loses her ovaries... yet never notices that her period stops. When her friend Phoebe goes on a commando raid (ditto) she reaches her destination without so much as seeing a guard, let alone having to deal with one. Worst of all, Julie's interlude with Satan is hard to justify as anything other than authorial manipulation. It simply made no sense for anyone raised in the modern world to exhibit such an egregious level of naivete.
But I think the biggest disappointment of the book is that it ends with a failure of intellectual courage. Though Morrow takes seriously the notion that Satan is a living force in the story, he does not explore the theological corollaries for God's existence, other than to resort to the sophomoric theology of Chris de Burgh's Spanish Train lyrics. That's disappointing, because Morrow is demonstrably capable of a deeper level of insight. Given Morrow's various skills, I suspect that leaving so much of the theology ambiguous and unsatisfying rather than proposing a definitive and satisfying solution was deliberate: people have been debating the existence of God and his seeming inaction in the world for millennia, without any single compelling answer emerging other than "the evidence of absence is evidence". Perhaps Morrow is simply conceding that it would be hubris to believe that he can propose an answer that hasn't already been proposed, and that the only virtue of theology is that it encourages us to keep striving to find that answer, thereby forcing us to actually think. But in a book that's designed to explore these complex issues in depth, that throwing up of one's hands in defeat felt like a cop-out.
The overall theme of the book can be stated, albeit with a loss of nuance, as the suggestion that religion is outdated and that it's long past time that we matured and discarded this relic of our racial childhood. Science may not necessarily be better than religion as a system of faith, but at least it works less hard than religion to justify atrocities and does not (evopsych devotees and eugenicists notwithstanding) try to blame those atrocities on a force other than ourselves. In the end, that message is what tips the balance for me to make the book a worthy, though frustrating and in many ways unsatisfying, read. Whatever the theological reality, we bear full responsibility for our choices and cannot blame those choices on anyone else. Whatever the theological failure of the rest of the book, that message is worth repeating.
Just finished James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter, now more than 20 years old, and find myself deeply conflicted about the book. Also more than a bit amused, since I've had this one in the "to read" pile for a great many months and hadn't noticed that it bubbled to the top of the pile less than a week before Christmas. Life has its entertaining serendipities...
Synopsis: As the title suggests, the story is about the modern-day sister of Jesus, begotten via a sperm bank and its experimental artificial womb. Whether by miracle or accident of biology, one of the donated sperm turns into a viable embryo and commences to growing into a female baby, later dubbed Julie by the paternal sperm donor, who rescues her and her mechawomb from the sperm bank just before it is blown apart by religious extremists. The rest of the tale describes Julie's grappling with her godhead (which is real and literal) and her mortality, as she retraces Christ's path to a modern Golgotha and what comes afterwards.
Let's start with the best parts. The writing is (you should pardon the wording) immaculate: it's clean, clear, effective, and at times gripping, and jerked an inadvertent tear or two from me by the end of the novel, which I won't spoil for you -- though given the context, you can probably infer much of what happens. I *liked* Julie. The text is salted with ironies and with jokes that range from the obvious but still funny (Pontius Pilate and his inferred co-Pilate, Satan as a vegetarian), clearly delivered as a chortle shared with the smirking author, to the painfully funny lines delivered with a completely straight face. Morrow does a sometimes remarkable job of capturing the essence of humanity struggling with an apparently hostile universe, and sometimes you just have to laugh because the alternative is tears and despair.
Then there are the less-good parts: The villains of the story are not even two-dimensionally evil; they're simply one-dimensional deranged morons. While I have some sympathy for this portrayal of religious extremists, it fails to satisfy me from a literary perspective. It feels clumsy, as if Morrow was pandering to the stereotypical agnostic/atheist SF reader rather than seriously exploring why people fall into this kind of belief system. There's enough sympathy-free venom here that it would take a whole nation of snakes to contain it. Ironically, Morrow ends up casting a similarly jaundiced eye upon the very readers he's pandering to. This may have been intentional; he's smart and skillful enough to weave this additional thread into an already rich tapestry. Though it felt like an unintended irony, it may also have been a clever and subtle reminder to readers that we too are not immune from foolish beliefs.
Another problem is that much of the plot is what has been called an "idiot plot", moving along by requiring decisions by the protagonist and other characters that even most idiots would never make. That makes the plot feel manipulative, which was disappointing, because I felt that Morrow did much subtler and more nuanced job of covering a similar topic in The Last Witchfinder. Although (obviously) a large suspension of disbelief is necessary to accept the plot premise and what follows, there are some egregious errors relating to a failure to follow through on certain obvious implications. For example, for reasons I won't go into, Julie loses her ovaries... yet never notices that her period stops. When her friend Phoebe goes on a commando raid (ditto) she reaches her destination without so much as seeing a guard, let alone having to deal with one. Worst of all, Julie's interlude with Satan is hard to justify as anything other than authorial manipulation. It simply made no sense for anyone raised in the modern world to exhibit such an egregious level of naivete.
But I think the biggest disappointment of the book is that it ends with a failure of intellectual courage. Though Morrow takes seriously the notion that Satan is a living force in the story, he does not explore the theological corollaries for God's existence, other than to resort to the sophomoric theology of Chris de Burgh's Spanish Train lyrics. That's disappointing, because Morrow is demonstrably capable of a deeper level of insight. Given Morrow's various skills, I suspect that leaving so much of the theology ambiguous and unsatisfying rather than proposing a definitive and satisfying solution was deliberate: people have been debating the existence of God and his seeming inaction in the world for millennia, without any single compelling answer emerging other than "the evidence of absence is evidence". Perhaps Morrow is simply conceding that it would be hubris to believe that he can propose an answer that hasn't already been proposed, and that the only virtue of theology is that it encourages us to keep striving to find that answer, thereby forcing us to actually think. But in a book that's designed to explore these complex issues in depth, that throwing up of one's hands in defeat felt like a cop-out.
The overall theme of the book can be stated, albeit with a loss of nuance, as the suggestion that religion is outdated and that it's long past time that we matured and discarded this relic of our racial childhood. Science may not necessarily be better than religion as a system of faith, but at least it works less hard than religion to justify atrocities and does not (evopsych devotees and eugenicists notwithstanding) try to blame those atrocities on a force other than ourselves. In the end, that message is what tips the balance for me to make the book a worthy, though frustrating and in many ways unsatisfying, read. Whatever the theological reality, we bear full responsibility for our choices and cannot blame those choices on anyone else. Whatever the theological failure of the rest of the book, that message is worth repeating.