Gibbon's Decline And Fall (1997) - Plot & Excerpts
There's something to be said for reaching for a hammer when perhaps a more delicate instrument might do the job nicely.I never read anything by Sheri Tepper before and as a woman writing SF I didn't want to automatically paint her with the "feminist" brush and assume that because she's a woman everything she writes is cloaked in metaphors about the dichotomy between men and women, just set on other planets or in the far future. Fortunately for me, she didn't bother with the metaphors and went straight into just spelling it out.This can probably be classified as science-fiction only because its set in the future from when the book is written (the turn of the current century, which now that we're fourteen years past it really makes me wonder where all the flying cars we were promised went) or even "speculative fiction" if you want to be like Margaret Atwood and not go near any of that yucky SF stuff, as if people aren't able to tell the difference between stuff like this and "War of the Worlds".The Atwood comparison doesn't entirely come out of left field. Much like her, Tepper has gone and written a novel that serves as sort of a thematic prequel to "The Handmaid's Tale" as both have to do with the idea of a fundamentalist conservative hierarchy of men taking over the country and turning women into walking Pez dispensers of infants. In Atwood's tale, we got a life during wartime type of view where the nightmare came true and we got to see just how unpleasant it would be. Here, we get to be on the cusp of it, where men collectively start to think that all the world's problems would be solved if women just spent more time in the kitchen making pies and sandwiches.If that sounds like I'm trying to be funny, it unfortunately is about the level of subtlety we get here. Our tale follows the world through the eyes of six women who meet in college and decide to band together as friends despite the fact that most of them seem to exist more as checkboxes on the scale of archetypes (the radical lesbian, the religious one, the one with the eating disorder, etc). One of them, nicknamed Sophy, appears to be more special than most , something that becomes more pronounced when the narrative jumps ahead about forty years to the end of the twentieth century and we catch up with the ladies in their various states of success and failure. They've all kept in touch except for Sophy, who seems to have disappeared at some point even though some of the women still hear her voice or see her occasionally. In the interim the world has become more man-oriented, with a wave of conservatism growing that threatens to relegate women to third class citizen status after cats and dogs, promising a new world order that won't be pleasant depending on which restroom door you go through.Part of the enjoyment of this book is going to depend on how on-board you are for Tepper's gender politics here, as a good chunk of the plot exists to deliver them and conveniently show how a women-oriented world would be better. While I'm not completely behind her on the notion that everything is men's fault, I'm not unsympathetic either (certainly aspects of the last few years of political debate has proven, whatever your personal politics, it's still a valid issue for discussion), but the book seems blatantly designed to prove that she's right in a fashion that borders on the ham-fisted. The gap between the beginning and where the plot picks up doesn't help, as we don't get to see the insidious chipping away of women's rights, the slippery slope of compromise over the decades that puts people in a position that they didn't quite intend. Instead, we're given multiple scenarios with the various women that basically boil down to "men stink, and they're ruining everything."Which isn't surprising given that the book features more or less two kinds of men, ones that are sensitive and compassionate and caring (and thus are helping our heroines, if they aren't already married to them), or complete jerks who feel that women are worthless and should only exist to bear children. One of the lead men of this ilk, a lawyer named Jagger, is almost a teeth-gnashing parody of manliness, flailing about with a hatred of women that would only border on the irrational if it hadn't already annexed everything around it. He's part of a group called the Alliance, a shadowy organization that in the spirit of every shadowy organization ever, is working with the government and religious leaders (look, fundamentalist Christians and Muslims actually agreeing on something!) to undo every right women ever had and make it a man's man's man's man's world, baby.The problem that all of this is over the top that its hard to buy into the scenario. When every man they come into contact with is spouting the same "get thee to a kitchen, babydoll" nonsense and the Alliance is bwah-ha-haing about the World To Come in the background, it starts to become so much static as the plot appears to go in circles. Look, Helen is afraid of her husband. Look, Agnes is questioning her faith. Look, Carolyn is defending a Symbolic Person. And golly, everyone keeps hearing Sophy. There's very little nuance to be found anywhere, and if you're at all religious you are going to find this book making you very unhappy at some points. I'm far from the most religious person in the world but even I had to wince when Agnes the nun of the group isn't able to coherently articulate a counter-argument to anything anyone else says, and then gets slapped down by the head male priest anyway because he hates women too like everyone else. Having everyone wearing a priest's habit either be bigoted or deluded (in Agnes' case, clearly its because she's denying part of herself) sort of stacks the deck for the book, especially when Sophy's stories of a women-centered goddess are meant to be taken as entirely reasonable. The book would have been far more electric as a debate if Tepper had been able to a conceive of a rational argument for religion that the characters could argue against, instead of making everyone religious seem like idiots and making it clear where the book's sympathies lie.Even if any of that was manageable, she sort of shoots herself in the foot by allowing the book to descend into vague magical realism and mysticism, undercutting the ultimate point of the book that the sickness comes from man himself. Instead, the book comes across as unfocused, with the Alliance conspiring hitting against Carolyn's defense of a young girl hitting against religious arguments hitting against a plague that seems to suddenly make men less macho out of nowhere hitting against the dueling faceless armies of old women and men with torches. She's trying for a global cross-section but it never gathers the momentum would give it the horrifying drumbeat of inevitability. By the time we reach Sophy's secret and the origin of the sinister old man Webster who heads the Alliance, it's lost almost all sense of the real, giving mankind a way out by suggesting all these bad, bad men have just come under the sway of a force beyond space and time, making it into another facet of the timeless battle between Good and Evil, where the messier truth would have hit harder, that we are responsible for our own actions ultimately, both as individuals and as a society, and that we must constantly be on guard to ensure that the rights of others are not trampled upon or diminished, as they so easily can be. In that light, the SF element comes across as more awkward than anything else, spacesuit people blundering into your finely wrought drama and wrecking the whole tone. With well-drawn characters and a focused scenario it would have been off-putting. In this case it's more white noise stacked on incoherence.It's telling that the sharpest and most coherent section of the novel is the trial segment, where Tepper through Carolyn argues that society has to take some responsibility for the way a person is, not by abandoning them and then passing judgement when they don't know how to act. The debates here, while still somewhat one-sided, gain a passion and drama that the rest of the novel is lacking and while the later inclusion of the SF element spices things up slightly, it's still too little too late. We needed to see the world as it could be, not as it almost was, and its a shame that she wasn't able to make a world that I recognize, especially when I can open the newspaper and see these same arguments played out across the world, in shouts and knives, in bombs and laws. While most fiction can function as escapism, I don't think this one was intended as such, and yet with this world and that one facing each other, I'd almost want to escape to hers. At least there, despite the window-dressing touches of grey, I can have some assurance that things will ultimately turn out to be okay, while here we remain a work in progress.
I tried. I did. This book has been on my to-read shelf since I was in high school (I went through a major Sheri Tepper phase for a while), and I was really looking forward to revisiting an author I'd really enjoyed in the past. Unfortunately, I cannot get into this book to save my life. Several months' hard slogging brought me about halfway through, and I still can't bring myself to care much about the characters one way or another. It's militantly, didactically "feminist" in the way that kind of makes my teeth hurt: men bad, women good, heterosexual relationships are inherently damaging and oppressive, etc. The cast-- the "Decline and Fall Club," a group of old college friends reacting variously to what appear to be the End Times-- remind me of the kids from Captain Planet-- carefully chosen from various races and cultures, representing various properly-empowering vocations. (Faye, the militant black lesbian artist, seems to have "TOKEN" stamped across her forehead in large block letters.) The villains are men in general (and conservative, politically powerful men in particular). The time frame is, apparently, the turn of the millenium. Granted, this book was written and published just before the Internet came into general use. At the same time, it's bizarre how completely off Tepper's predictions are. For someone apparently writing in 1993 or 1994, she came up with a truly... unexpected... vision of 2000. Criminals being put into suspended animation as a punishment was particularly surprising. Furthermore, she seems to have had some trouble with basic math skills: characters who were supposed to be 17 and 18 in 1959 are described as "in their forties" in 2000. On the whole, the book is strange, and not really in a good way. I might keep it around, and try to finish it, but I can't quite keep it at the top of my reading list. (On the other hand, just talking about how strange it is has made me kind of curious to see what will happen, so I might pick it up again after all.)
What do You think about Gibbon's Decline And Fall (1997)?
First note: WHOA ABLISM. Second note: this made me hella uncomfortable in a race perspective - not sure if it's actually racist, but be aware. Third note: if you have difficulty reading about children and babies dying in awful ways, this is not a good book for you.What I liked about this that I didn't about, say, Native Tongue (to use another example of feminist literature I read and enjoyed) was that they manage to show evil misogynists, actual decent men, AND general assholes who abused the privilege they were given. I also liked that of the 6 main viewpoint characters, two explicitly supported the patriarchy, though I felt their arguments lacked the conviction they should have had. On the other hand, I doubt I could have written them better.[spoilers follow]I think what this book missed most was actual evil women, which with the exception of Carolyn's aunts in the very beginning and maaaaybe Jagger's mother, it had none. The book keeps repeating "this isn't man vs. woman, it's dominion vs. wisdom!" but it seemed an awful lot like it was women (and allies) vs. men.I wonder if it was the author's intention to portray the society Sovawanea came from as female-supremacist or as an ideal of equality. The story of Elder Sister's medicin bag really weirds me out. If it's supposed to be a tale from an idyllic equal society, it fails, because in it women explicitly take ownership of men's sexuality against their wills. This is justified by equating male sexuality - or sexuality at all - with violence. Which makes sense if you're a society of parthenogenetic lizard women, I guess, but isn't the kind of morality I'd like to see accepted in our own world.Also, in the end, Carolyn is chosen to decide the fate of all mankind, which I felt really undermined the premise: you had this somewhat diverse cast of women, and then they all knowingly give the decision to the straight white happily-married woman to decide on her own. That rubs me hella wrong. Also I'm not certain whether the solution she chose was explicitly stated and I missed it, or if it was intentionally left vague. Which I can understand the writer doing, but I do wish she'd have stated a choice, and some of its reprecussions.Ah well. Guess that's fanfic is for. :)
—Dana Ragnarok
Possibly it deserves more stars, because it stuck with me for years between reads, but the flaws (IANAL, but I don't think trials work like that; some extrapolations of the year 2000 would have been far-fetched even in 1995; the bad guys seemed a little cartoony - I think most misogynists of that kind think they're not woman-haters but decent guys who make a realistic valuation of women; more seriously, she's not very good at intersectionality) jumped out at me more this time round. On the other hand, it bears remembering that people who vocally dislike Tepper mostly seem to dislike her not because of where she goes wrong, but because of where she's right. I love all the characters, and would have loved to see more of the college section.
—Chris
Even with a past as an English major and as someone who enjoys long yarns about literature, its themes and symbolism... a book can have too much. This one did. The characters here, other than the lead, were only memorable as caricatures. This included the villains.Still, Tepper's work always sticks with me and never bores, despite laying it on a little TOO thick in this particular novel. Her commentary on American society, feminism, and male-female relationships is eerie in its ability to strike to the center of problems we see right now. As a lawyer I was interested in the arguments and counter-arguments brought up in the trial, which serves as the background driving plot. I would have loved more detail in that realm, but perhaps that kind of exposition is better left for law-nerds like myself.Altogether: not her best (try Grass or The Family Tree), but still memorable and worth the time if you're at all interested. I believe it will stick with me for years to come.
—Marie
