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The Two of Them
Jan. 12th, 2013 15:31Russ, Joanna. The Two of Them. London: The Women's Press, 1986. [1978]
The late Joanna Russ was one of the giants of feminist science fiction (I have the T-shirt to prove it), and eventually it's my goal to read everything she wrote. This necessarily involves scrounging around in used bookstores, because a good chunk of what she wrote is out of print--though happily this particular novel is actually back in print, from Wesleyan University Press, which SFF fans should already know as the re-publishers of many of Chip Delany's under-appreciated books. I'm pleased to have a Women's Press edition of this one, though, since it matches my Women's Press edition of The Adventures of Alyx (thanks, Ireland!).
The Two of Them is the last SF novel Russ ever wrote. It follows the adventures of two agents of the TransTemp Agency, which features in some of the Alyx stories and which has only ever recruited one woman, Irene Waskiewicz, the protagonist of this novel. Irene and her partner/mentor/lover Ernst, who rescued her from the doldrums of adolescence in 1950s America and took her, literally, across the universe(s), arrive on the remote settlement Ka'abah, apparently practitioners of some warped and truncated form of Islam, to do their usual work, stealing information for the Agency. When Irene decides to take the would-be poet Zubeydeh out of the confines of her patriarchal society, however, the two of them discover some depressing truths about the place of women just about everywhere.
The novel is, for the most part, lively and depressing, which is a combination that Russ is good at. I did find Irene sympathetic, though I really didn't care for Zubeydeh (after Violet in Magic Under Stone, my tolerance for tiresome spoiled girls is at a low ebb), and I'm not broken up over Ernst's eventual fate, either.
Overall, I don't think this novel is as much of a mess as Brit Mandelo does--I'd urge you to read that post, as it's a really good discussion of the novel, but I found the fourth-wall breaking interjections by the author to be, if not quite hilarious, amusing, and the ending is bleak but also, against the odds, hopeful, though hopeful in that "Atlantic City" kind of way, I suppose. The central problem of the novel is the problem that Irene comes to discover, that there is no way out, no escape even for an extraordinary woman, and she isn't actually extraordinary. And even if she was, what right does that give her to even a temporary reprieve? Zubeydeh is saved because of her poetry, but what about all the other ordinary girls and women throughout the universe? Don't they deserve liberation too? In this context, the metaphorical ending of the novel, hopeful as it is, doesn't seem to outweigh what facts the narrative gives us about actual Irene and actual Zubeydeh.
( The Joanna Russ meme )
The late Joanna Russ was one of the giants of feminist science fiction (I have the T-shirt to prove it), and eventually it's my goal to read everything she wrote. This necessarily involves scrounging around in used bookstores, because a good chunk of what she wrote is out of print--though happily this particular novel is actually back in print, from Wesleyan University Press, which SFF fans should already know as the re-publishers of many of Chip Delany's under-appreciated books. I'm pleased to have a Women's Press edition of this one, though, since it matches my Women's Press edition of The Adventures of Alyx (thanks, Ireland!).
The Two of Them is the last SF novel Russ ever wrote. It follows the adventures of two agents of the TransTemp Agency, which features in some of the Alyx stories and which has only ever recruited one woman, Irene Waskiewicz, the protagonist of this novel. Irene and her partner/mentor/lover Ernst, who rescued her from the doldrums of adolescence in 1950s America and took her, literally, across the universe(s), arrive on the remote settlement Ka'abah, apparently practitioners of some warped and truncated form of Islam, to do their usual work, stealing information for the Agency. When Irene decides to take the would-be poet Zubeydeh out of the confines of her patriarchal society, however, the two of them discover some depressing truths about the place of women just about everywhere.
The novel is, for the most part, lively and depressing, which is a combination that Russ is good at. I did find Irene sympathetic, though I really didn't care for Zubeydeh (after Violet in Magic Under Stone, my tolerance for tiresome spoiled girls is at a low ebb), and I'm not broken up over Ernst's eventual fate, either.
Overall, I don't think this novel is as much of a mess as Brit Mandelo does--I'd urge you to read that post, as it's a really good discussion of the novel, but I found the fourth-wall breaking interjections by the author to be, if not quite hilarious, amusing, and the ending is bleak but also, against the odds, hopeful, though hopeful in that "Atlantic City" kind of way, I suppose. The central problem of the novel is the problem that Irene comes to discover, that there is no way out, no escape even for an extraordinary woman, and she isn't actually extraordinary. And even if she was, what right does that give her to even a temporary reprieve? Zubeydeh is saved because of her poetry, but what about all the other ordinary girls and women throughout the universe? Don't they deserve liberation too? In this context, the metaphorical ending of the novel, hopeful as it is, doesn't seem to outweigh what facts the narrative gives us about actual Irene and actual Zubeydeh.
( The Joanna Russ meme )
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