It's written well, but oh my god is this book insanely cynical about humanity (I'd say it's mostly cynical about men, but there's only two female characters who get any sort of real page time, and the second one is herself paranoid and utterly cynical). The book postulates that the arrival of aliens doing nothing but just hanging around would be enough to cause nations to go mad and destroy the planet, and then later postulates that all men who would grow to lead the post apocalyptic settlements would turn into fascist wannabe cult leaders who are desperate to wage war on each other. In the face of all this is Elspeth, the rare character who despite her own depression and despair somehow manages to keep focusing upon healing and figuring things out so as to save the day, both from threats that are human and those that are inhuman and alien. I get that there's a theme about hope and healing and whatnot here, but god I couldn't help but keep being removed from this narrative not just by occasional issues with the tech levels of the setting, but really just from the dismal unbelievable cynicism about human nature all around (and yes I can say that even living in 2025).
Trigger Warning: A Suicide Attempt forms a major part of the story. This is not gratuitous and the book shows what is necessary for its themes and emotional beats to hit, so I think it's done as well as you could hope, but if this is a problem please be warned.
Plot Summary:
Twenty Years Ago Dr. Elspeth Darrow was merely an ordinary pathologist, one who was also happily married and expecting her first child. And then the Hilamen came from the skies and the world of men lost its mind, causing the apocalypse themselves. Now, in the dismally rebuilding world, Elspeth is the only trained doctor in the colony of Neo San Francisco, running a hospital out of what was the east wing of City Hall. It doesn't matter that she was never trained for practical patient work - Elspeth is the only one with the medical knowledge necessary to save lives with what limited medical supplies they have, and despite necessary rationing of medicine, she's going to save as many people as she can. Even if her job is made harder by Mayor Hutch of San Francisco starting to have more and more grand ambitions of power and his rule.
But when a trip to obtain medical supplies ends not only in disaster, but also Elspeth coming across a dead alien - a Hilaman - Elspeth finds herself for the first time in 20 years using her pathology skills to try to figure out what happened. And as more and more Hilamen begin mysteriously dying and Mayor Hutch and the other leaders of colonies begin taking an interest in the dead aliens, Elspeth and her friends find themselves desperately in a race to find a way to save the Hilamen from whatever is killing them...before it is too late for all of humanity....
It's kind of hard to describe the plot of Saint Elspeth too much given that the book starts on a very very slow note. The alien contact happens really for the first time in Chapter 10, nearly 30% (and over a 100 pages in), with the story largely comprised of setting the table and dealing with Elspeth's struggle among short sighted warlike men to ensure the functionality of her hospital as the primary plot up to that point. This isn't really a problem in and of itself - that's certainly a viable plot such that it never feels like the book isn't going somewhere. But it does begin a problem that only gets worse as the book does reveal its main plot: a revelation that the setting is so cynical about humanity so as to be depressing and honestly unbelievable.
Some explanation here: Certainly I've read books where a future humanity has done some absolutely depressingly dismal things - reinstituted segregation and slavery for example (kind of a classic one there) - but these futures tend to be ones where we see humanity repeating acts that we've seen us capable of in the present. Here, this take on humanity sees Humanity reacting to the presence of aliens by.....global nuclear war out of panic? And in the rebuilding world, EVERY single leader of a colony we see is a man (it's always a man) who is a power hungry monster with delusions of grandeur? Don't get me wrong, claiming that humanity often is led astray or run by people's self-interest definitely has a ring of truth, but this book takes it to an utterly bizarre extreme. It's made even worse by the fact that while there are people who think otherwise, they're never in positions of power for some reason, such that the book's plot relies upon every human power deciding to kill each other rather than listen to anyone else about some other potential threat. Like again, I've seen that plot done before and it has a ring of truth, but it's so so blunt here and cynical as to be ridiculous and hard to believe here, and it kept me from enjoying or really getting into this book - especially given that one of the book's big themes/ideas was that its heroine Elspeth was the rare if not only person whose actions were driven by hope.
Which is a shame, because there's some good writing here and some certainly interesting characters. Besides Elspeth, you have her cowardly artsy medical student Ward (who midway through takes a leap of competence that is itself unbelievable), as well as a few other young people - some of whom start and stay antagonistic, while others change as the story goes on in ways that make sense and are pretty well done. There's a man who helps Elspeth who clearly is interested in her who I really liked and I wished she had more interest in him (maybe a little by the end) because he was a rare nice good egg. And the aliens are certainly interesting in concept, as is the book's use of another cynical sci-fi trope about interactions between alien life which i won't spoil here, so there's certainly some wonder and creativity there as well.
But overall I just couldn't get past the deep thick cynicism about humanity here. It's a cynicism the book does everything to enable, to the point of having characters suddenly have certain technology that seems unbelievable given the scrounging of this setting just to make it work (Gasoline is scarce...except when characters need trucks suddenly. The characters are secret...except the bad guys apparently still have the ability to bug one's room (but there's no computers so I guess they're just listening all the time?)). I know others really liked this and yes there's a theme of hope in the end, but I really wanted to DNF this one for all the impossible cynicism about humanity.
No comments:
Post a Comment