Subject: Prograde Reviews--Heather Spears:The Children of Atwar

From: [email-masked] (Aaron V. Humphrey)
Date: Sat, 09 Apr 1994 02:05:06 GMT

Heather Spears: The Children of Atwar

A Prograde Review by Aaron V. Humphrey  [some spoilers for this book and
    its prequel, _Moonfall_]

Heather Spears is one of the most unique writers I've ever read.

And I mean that.  This isn't just a circuitous way of saying "bad".  She's
really different.  So she may not be to everybody's taste.  She's a poet,
who has won several awards for her poetry, and has now turned to prose. 
She's Canadian, but currently living in Denmark.

To briefly summarize _Moonfall_, the previous book in the series:  Far in
the future, the Earth has become mostly uninhabitable except for the area
above the Arctic Circle(and presumably below the Antarctic).  In addition,
most "people" are bicephalic twins, by which I mean two heads(with separate
consciousnesses)sharing one body between them.  Tasman is born with only
one head, and she grows up aware of this difference.  She has children
herself, twins with _two_ bodies(i.e. twins as _we're_ used to them), Atwar
and Betwar.

The "Moonfall" of the title is the steadily-shrinking orbit of the moon,
which is making life difficult--earth tremors are growing more common, not
to mention the horrific tides.  The Outdead, an old monocephalic race(i.e.
us, or our descendants)left provision to deal with this...but the
bicephalic twins are too large to fit into the craft required.  Only Atwar,
whose legs were shriveled by a childhood accident, is able to enter a ship
and depart for the moon(which seems to have been terraformed sometime in
the interim).

Now, in the second book, Betwar's monocephalic children are raised
specifically to follow Atwar...their legs are bound from birth to stunt
them properly.  A cult has grown up around Atwar, and Betwar and his
children have to deal with them and the changes brought about in the world
by the receding of the moon.

This book is very low-key.  It doesn't help that almost half of the book's
length is taken up by an extensive glossary of Riksprok, the
Scandinavian-descended language spoken, and another collection of songs and
poetry(mostly concerned with the new religion of Atwar)both in Riskprok and
translated.  In the ca. 200 pages that remain, we devote most of our time
to watching Betwar's children grow up and the cult dominate the
settlement.  At the end, the children are sent off to follow Atwar, but
presumably what they find is saved for the next book.

The only comparison that comes to mind is Gabriel Garcia Marquez...and that
mostly because Spears' work reads like it's been translated from another
language.  Perhaps this is intentional--it _is_ supposed to have been
translated from Riksprok--or perhaps it's just her style.

This book may not be widely available outside of Canada(and maybe
Scandinavia, which would be appropriate...), but I imagine you could
special-order it if you were curious.  Myself, I'm curious enough to want
to know what happens in the next book... 

%A Spears, Heather
%T The Children of Atwar
%I Beach Holme Tesseract
%C Victoria, B.C.
%D Copyright 1993
%G ISBN 0-88878-335-3
%P 264 pp.
%S Moonfall
%V Book 2
%O Paperback, Can$7.95

-- 
--Alfvaen(Editor of Communique)
Current Album--Love & Rockets:Earth Sun Moon
Current Read--Antony Swithin:The Nine Gods of Safaddne
"pretend the needle thickens."  --lstewart