ike Cinderella, Dismé Latimer loathes the cruel woman who replaced her real mother, and the spoiled, malicious stepsister who rules the household. Unlike Cinderella, Dismé has no Prince Charming in her immediate future. Instead, she has a long, slow climb to adulthood, under the thumb of people who hate and
abuse her. Dismé learns to chatter blankly, to appear boring and compliant, and to hide the strange, angry, powerful creature inside her, which she calls the Roarer. She also learns to hide everything important, like her ability to see the wraithlike ouphs and to conjure fire. Most importantly, she hides the ancient diary of her ancestor Nell Latimer, which discusses The Happening that killed most of Earth's population and caused magic—generally known as The Art—to be lost from the world.
By the time Dismé has grown up, her stepsister Rashel has achieved prominence and power, while Dismé is still little more than a household servant. Like her mother, Rashel seems oddly determined to keep Dismé close and physically safe, but also as miserable as possible. But in the corrupt, pitiless, doctrine-ruled city of Bastion, Dismé doesn't dare leave the scant protection of Rashel's shadow.
Meanwhile, a ruthless, selfish boy named Gowl grows up to be a ruthless, selfish general who's willing to practice dark arts and human sacrifice to gain personal power. A kindly doctor hides his heretical beliefs and secretly works to help people both in and out of his sanctimonious city. Weird creatures called pings pop into being to question people, then disappear again. In a distant, well-ordered land, a magical device left behind generations ago finally achieves its purpose when a prophesied sign appears. Technologically advanced demons strike a bargain with humanity and provide the religiously necessary service of bottling up samples of living tissue to be stored in remembrance walls. Something that came with The Happening shifts from its frozen landing point in the north and heads toward inhabited lands. And in
excerpts from Nell Latimer's book, author Sheri Tepper reveals how the world came to change so drastically, and what happened to the first wave of people who survived The Happening.
A book that can be all genres to all readers
Getting into The Visitor takes some dogged endurance; the opening chapters are florid and confusing, and the first quarter of the book is often baffling. Tepper introduces a great many places, eras and characters all at once, along with a mythic vocabulary that's utterly impenetrable at first glance. Dismé's childhood point of view offers no explanation of such common things as pings, demons and ouphs, and the entire concept of "bottling," which is a key both to the plot and to Dismé's society, isn't explained in full until midway through the book. This obliqueness can be frustrating; other fine authors, notably C.J. Cherryh and Neal Stephenson, often pull the same trick, and all three writers sometimes seem to be testing both the patience and the intellect of their audiences.
But patient readers will find vast rewards in The Visitor, which ultimately weaves together an intricate and multileveled sociological construct with a post-apocalyptic science-fiction plot, a grim and gory horror story and an assortment of fantasy themes. The result is hard to categorize into a genre, and it's exciting in its sheer unpredictability. Tepper's writing style varies admirably, depending on her focus: The Latimer journal sections, which begin with a modern-day astronomer dealing with an extraterrestrial anomaly, are dialogue-driven and down to earth, while the segment dealing with the magical mystery device has the mythopoeic, universal qualities of a good fairy tale. Much of the rest of the book focuses on exposing the intriguing nature of Dismé's world, even as it starts to fragment under the pressures of a manipulative and hungry evil.
The Visitor's ending isn't as problematic as its beginning, though it does have a mildly unsatisfying deus ex machina quality, as the book's mythic elements overwhelm the human elements and things happen a bit too fast. But taken as a whole, the book is beautifully and creatively constructed, full of fascinating and changeable characters and societies, all of which interact in complex and surprising ways. Tepper's latest book may be meant as an intellectual challenge on some level, but it's a challenge well worth meeting.
