he first volume in Suzy McKee Charnas' Holdfast Chronicles, Walk to the End of the World, describes the society that takes root after nuclear and biological warfare have ravaged the Earth. Basing their worldview on a fractured version of history, the men of Holdfast are taught that women are to blame for the destruction. They also believe that anyone who knows his father's identity would inevitably fight him to the death. Male children are therefore born and raised anonymously.
At the same time, women have been reduced to slavery. Known as fems, they live in conditions of shocking depravity, burned as witches for the slightest transgressions and surviving the food rationing of Holdfast by consuming the bodies of their dead. Resistance against their masters is of the most rudimentary kind, with their leaders generally counseling that women be resigned to their fate. When this leadership, the Matris, comes under challenge from radical young women, they contrive to slip a message runner named Alldera into a party of male travelers. Alldera's mission is to pretend to have contacted free fems living outside Holdfast, and to calm the rebellious women by claiming outside help is on the way.
The men Alldera serves are on their own quest, however, driven by a man named Ekyar Bek, who knows his father's identity and is consumed with seeking him out. Accompanied by a lover from his youth and an unconventional soldier, Bek drags the party across Holdfast. To follow the Matris' orders, Alldera must cater to the men's every physical need, survive their violence and whims, and keep her activities completely beneath their notice. That accomplished, she must return to the Matris with her false message before the revolution simmering throughout this fragile society comes to a full boil.
A dark and disturbing dystopia
Walk to the End of the World is the beginning of Alldera's journey, a story that is later picked up in Charnas' Motherlines, The Furies, and 1999's Tiptree Award-winning The Conquerer's Child. This first installment is entirely a portrait of Holdfast and the practices that shape it. Because humanity's survivors are so few, the world explored by Alldera and her masters is physically small, giving the author room to examine the society in detail. Everything from the
extensive use of hemp to the self-serving reworking of Christian myth into the story of a son rebelling against his father—and dying for it—is delivered with dark and convincing authority. It is a world that fascinates as it repels, and Charnas pulls no punches.
The cast of characters is no less compelling. Tied up by dozens of taboos, the three men struggle even to travel together in relative equanimity. Bek's knowledge of his father's identity has marked him since childhood, and Holdfast's leaders exiled him for it to a position at Endpath, brewing toxic doses of narcotics for men who want to die. His profound need for answers drives the story, and the somber focus imparted by his years of dealing in death makes him a strong foundation for the rest of the novel's characters.
Needless to say, Walk to the End of the World is a dark book, and readers who like at least a little light thrown into their dystopic fiction will find precious little relief from the misery of Holdfast. This society of panicky men has no redeeming features—it is a bleak and unredeemable world, a study in total dysfunction. It is a society in crisis, violent and unstable by its very nature, a world where humanity is at complete odds with its environment and itself.
