Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel The Book of Joan (2017) is inventive.
The writer conceives of ways to imagine the future that few others, at least
that I'm aware of, have managed. The writing tends towards portentousness and
hyperbole. It's not quite fantasy, not quite science fiction. The novel is
feminist, but its premises are vague, and at points it's difficult to know
exactly where the writer is trying to go. The novel takes place in the future,
sometimes after a global disaster has wiped out most of the human race and
destroyed life on earth. The cause seems to have been both natural and
man-made—the result of volcanic eruptions in the Deccan Flats in India, of war,
pollution, and overuse of natural resources, and of the actions or powers of
one of the characters. (The Deccan Flats are sometimes cited as a contributing cause
of the rapid extinctions following the asteroid impact in the Gulf of Mexico 60
million years ago). A few survivors have escaped to caves below the surface of
the earth and others have ascended to what appears to be a space station
orbiting the dead planet, ruled over by a dictator named Jean de Men. He at
first seems to be the embodiment of patriarchy, though events later in the
novel call that into question. Those who have taken refuge on the station have
been severely altered by radiation. Their genitals have atrophied and
disappeared, and they cannot reproduce naturally. They have taken to altering
their bodies with cosmetic surgery that adds sculptures and writings fashioned
out of skin. These are not tattoos but rather more radical body alterations
that leave an already unrecognizable human form even more so.
The main characters include a
woman on the space station named Christine.
She is a writer, but since paper has disappeared along with all forms of
printed communication, she inscribes the story she's trying to tell on the skin
of her body. Her lover is a man named Trinculo, a supreme genius (so we are
told, though he mostly seems a master of bombast) who's been condemned to death
by Jean de Men for his rebelliousness. Christine herself is about to turn 50. At the end of her fiftieth year she will be terminated
because the law requires that everyone must die at the age of 50—this is to
save resources. Down on the surface of the earth hiding in caves are Leon and
Joan. They are lovers, and rebels. Joan has mythic significance. She’s somehow responsible for the extinction
of humanity but also the only hope for its restoration. The people on the space
station believed that she was burned to death many years ago as a traitor. Somehow,
she has survived, and she is now plotting to destroy de Men.
Yuknavitch makes it easy to
identify the potential allegory in her novel: Christine’s nickname is Christ, the
last two syllables of the dictator’s name are revealing, Joan is obviously
modeled after Joan of Arc, but she also has certain Christ-like qualities: she must
die in order to bring about the restoration of life on the earth, and so on. But
where does she get her power? This isn’t a religious novel.
The language is often breathless
and poetic, abstract and long-winded. It's the kind of language, whether it's
dialogic or discursive, that you would expect to find in a videogame. There’s
too much speaking and declamation. There's little that's believable. The story
is interesting throughout, but the terms of the narrative are so vague and the
situations so unlikely, the application of logic so absent, that it's difficult
to take much of it seriously. It's self-indulgent to an extreme. One can admire
the complicated scenarios. We can infer
what the writer wants them to mean, the allegory of patriarchy, gender, environment,
human excess she hopes to establish, but she insists too much on that meaning
rather than allowing it to come out naturally.
The result is a didactic, ambiguous, overblown muddle.
