Story review: The Destroyer by Tara Isabella Burton

This is a tough one for me to score and review. As with the previous tales in the collection, the quality of the writing and construction show that these stories are indeed Some of the best. Here we have have a story told from the POV of the daughter of a scientist - born from self-cloning, and then pressured into being constantly enhanced into something more than human. Her mother is clearly brilliant, driven and insane and this leads to my issue with the piece; I loathe mad-scientist stories. I grew up on pulp and b-movie narrative where the world was destroyed by over-reaching, over-ambitious, arrogant or just plain evil and see the erosion in expertise this, in part, has lead to. It is a theme that has become part of our culture, repeated endlessly in lazy articles and online arguments. In reality, it is not science and scientists that cause the problems, nor even war and generals, but politics and politicians misusing the tools provided to them.



Now, I know that many of the great "destruction by science" tales are not about arrogant scientists at all, or barely so - the progenitor of the genre, Frankenstein, is misread as such, and is a deeper story about a search for meaning and a creator - but just reading that trope tends to set my teeth on edge.



However, that is my reaction to that aspect of the story and is, perhaps, rather unfair. Because this is a fabulous piece of writing. Burton suggests the world as a backdrop - it is in Rome, including the great structures such as the Colosseum and the Senate on the Capitoline Hill, ruled over by Caesar. Is this scientist a witch or an alchemist? But we get reference to other cities that were not contemporaries of classical Rome, and dropped references to technology that is distinctly modern. That fact that this left as no more than hints and never explained makes the backdrop tantalising and somehow mythical.



The first-person narration from the daughter, in the past tense further enhances the mythic quality, and a sense of doom; the story opens "Long before my mother destroyed the world, her experiments were quieter, more contained." So we know where this is going. The backbone of this story, like The Art of Space Travel, the previous one in the collection, is this mother/daughter relationship, although this is obviously far darker and more negative than that of Emily and Moolie, as mother pressures daughter (neither is given a name) through the promise of a fake love to become what the mother wants, despite her own wishes, but ultimately is saved by this and becomes greater than her parent.



You know, I think I've talked myself around.

Book Review: The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison: Marginally less bleak than The Road

Perhaps it's not surprising that a book set during and after an apocalypse is bleak, and this is less bleak than Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but in many ways it's still a book that I'm not sure the word 'enjoy' attaches to.




A sudden, rampant plague starts to kill people in massive numbers. Women seem even more effected than men, perhaps only a tenth as many surviving, and not a single child survives birth.




A maternity nurse recovers from the fever, waking in her apartment to witness that the ravages she had been trying to treat - or ameliorate - have left devastation. Her first encounter with another human being is an attempted rape, and she quickly decides to disguise herself as a man for safety.




Her travels to eventual safety are fraught and disturbing. ( This is not a spoiler, by the way; the novel is prefaced with a future monastery-like scene where a woman leads some boys in making copies of the Book of the Unnamed Midwife, so we know there is some sort of continuation ).




One thing that gave me pause - not while I was reading it, as the writing is of such a high quality that it wasn't until I paused that questions came - is that in the first part of the book her encounters with men portray them almost exclusively as wanting to rape and and own and control the few remaining women in the most horrific ways. I don't think the evidence of how the vast majority of people behave after disasters maps onto this (although this is of a scale unseen; I know complete devastation has happened more locally and would be interested to see if there is a difference) but then I began to see this as much of a metaphor for toxic masculinity as anything else. If this were written by a man it would probably come across as some awful rape fantasy like those appalling Gor books.




As the story progresses we get asides, mentioning what happens to some of the people the wanderer ( she chooses different names constantly, and I do like how Elison then sticks to that name while it is in use ) or just to mention what is happening in other parts of the world - all of which tend to be at least as bleak as the main narrative.




Well worth reading - but, of course, bear in mind the sexual violence warning, and general timbre - but I think I'm genuinely looking to the next volume. I'm hoping this will be less bleak.




original review on goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2485957571?