n 2300 B.C., the empire of Sumeria is flourishing. The city of Erech is filled with traders and craftsmen, merchants and priestesses, farmers and slaves. One of the latter is a young woman named Shula. A Semite captured as a child during a war, Shula is bonded to a pleasant family whose members nonetheless view her with all the impersonal disdain reserved for those of her status. Shula's life is tolerable enough—even if she has to serve as unwilling bed companion to the family's eldest son—due to her visions, which have been coming more and more frequently of late. Shula is privy to glimpses of Inanna, the queen of heaven. But lately, a more troubling deity has been appearing: Belili-lit, who is accompanied by the Serpent That Knows No Charm. Belili and Inanna are rivals in some indefinable way, and Shula feels torn between them.
When Inanna's grace descends quite publicly on Shula, she is freed and made a priestess. But life as a devotee of the goddess proves to have its own strictures and demands. Eventually Shula's rebellious, independent nature runs afoul of the rules of the temple, and she is sentenced to a public caning that might very well result in her death.
Our narrative cuts at this point to the present-day world, where two adolescents are growing up awkwardly in a small U.S. city named Elmdale. Wendy Chrenko is possessed of an unconventional yet appealing beauty and spirit which are wasted on her peers who can identify only with stereotypical good looks and conventional patterns of thought. Ostracized, she is forced to fall back on her inner resources. At the depths of her desperation, she has a vision of Belili and the Serpent, a vision that allows her to enter her high-school years with new confidence and wisdom. Ray Mackie, meanwhile, is struggling with being constantly uprooted and with his abusive, alcoholic father. When the artistically gifted Ray and Wendy are thrown together by circumstance, they find themselves to be soulmates. But upon graduation, their lives take a wrong turn. Ray has been forced by economic necessity to enter a shady life of hacker criminality, while Wendy's college days are filled with her borderline-obsessive pursuit to prove the reality of prehistoric matriarchies. A further wedge is driven between them by Wendy's accidental pregnancy, and they split acrimoniously.
Years pass, and Wendy is on the point of using a radical means to satisfy her quest. She will enter into an experimental virtual-reality simulation of ancient Sumeria and try to get answers to the enigmas of prehistory by living it. And that's when both Shula and Ray re-enter the picture.
Fantasy and SF form an uneasy blend
Sherri Tepper, Ursula Le Guin, Nalo Hopkinson: three names linked to speculative works that embody at varying times and to varying degrees a worldview that might be somewhat reductively labeled "feminist" or "pagan" or "anti-patriarchal." Anne Harris' new novel places her squarely in this lineage, and just like her illustrious predecessors she strives for a nuanced, non-dogmatic worldview which still seeks to subvert the dominant paradigm. I'd have to say she mostly succeeds on the character level and incident by incident. But on the grand architectural level of the novel, it seems to me that she actually undermines her thesis.
First, what's to admire? Quite a bit, actually. Harris' depiction of Sumeria is thick and rich. One gets a palpable sense of the texture of ancient life. The Sumerians exhibit attitudes and reactions thoroughly shaped by their non-modern worldview. The character of Shula is winning and believable, her exploits emotionally engaging. And the mythology of the period is cogently distilled. Likewise, to an even greater extent, the modern environs of Elmdale are immaculately rendered. Wendy and Ray become a pair of lovers we root for, and their roller-coaster ride through a gauntlet of school bullies, academic pressures and sleazy underworld doings is vivid and affecting. For the most part, Harris lays out her philosophical issues and themes with a fine brush, not a trowel. Characters express their contentious positions without being reduced solely to walking arguments. The hard process of becoming mature is fleshed out with careful strokes. (Although, every once in a while, expressions like "embrace her individuality" lend a psychobabble feel to what we in the lit biz otherwise like to refer to in Joycean terms as "forging in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.") Taken all in all then, Harris delivers two narrative arcs that each pack a powerful punch.
The problem arises in the relationship between them.
Shula's world, we learn, is only a VR sim. (And one that relies on software and hardware developed in a six-month period!) There's some talk of accessing mythological levels of the human brain to flesh out the experience, but it still all boils down to a head trip. There is no actual ontological heft to the goddess realm, and all of Shula's experiences that we've invested our faith in are thereby undercut. Unlike Hopkinson's The Salt Roads, where supernatural past, present and future actually impact one another, this novel seems to say that Belili and Inanna are useful as inspirational figures in a kind of cyber-vision quest but have no objective reality. Now, while this is a viewpoint eminently consistent with the science-fictional mindset, it excludes the very thing that Harris seemed intent on introducing: the balancing forces of the prehistoric matriarchies. While the utopian ending fulfills the utopian threads earlier introduced, it's a secular paradise where videogames co-opt the goddess, not the other way around. The marriage seems less heavenly and more earthly, whereas we've been prepped for some real intrusion of the transmundane that never occurs.
