Subject: Sheri S. Tepper: A Plague of Angels

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: 23 Oct 93 01:21:50 GMT

About a century and a half ago, all but a handful of people left Earth
for the stars.  (Or so it's said:  Since people started burning books 
over fifty years old, history has become oral and unreliable.)  There
remain a few high-tech enclaves, a few festering cities, some farms and
small villages, a few non-traditional societies.  (These remnants, and
the relations among them, don't make much historical or economic sense,
at first glance.)

The main protagonists are Abasio and Orphan.  Abasio leaves the farm,
as many do, for the city, where he joins a gang:  There aren't many
roles left in the city.  You can be in a gang or you can sell to gangs
and pay protection, if you're male.  If you're female, you can be a
slave (concubine, technically) or you can be a prostitute or you can
be too old.  If you're a child, you're a rarity:  Endemic immune-
deficiency viruses and other ills have led to low fertility rates.

Orphan is a child growing up in an archetypal village -- a village
of Suffering Artists and Ingenues and Misers and Wise Crones and
Heroes and similar archetypes.  (The Oracle who helps raise her
has her hands full:  Orphan just won't look pale and wan and walk
around begrimed with ashes.)  Such a village may be the only place
on Earth where she could grow up safely, because there are beings
-- Walkers -- looking for someone who matches her description.

Seeking her -- seeking *them*, once their paths cross -- is the Witch,
an insane leader of a high-tech enclave, who has reason to believe
that Orphan is her key to world domination.  They flee through a
world going mythic -- a world in which monsters have reappeared and
some animals talk and the remains of the old high-tech civilization
are being eradicated.

The final explanation comes as something of a shock.  (I'm not sure
whether Tepper played 'fair'.  On the one hand, the key question turns
out to have an answer strongly supported by common sense and mathematics.
On the other hand, this answer contradicts what the reader reasonably
accepted as a basic starting premise for the story.)  We learn what
the humanity of bygone generations did, and what's being done about it.

In feel, this book resembles nothing so much as Tepper's "Beauty".  It
lacks the deliberate play on specific fairy tales, but it is similar
in its juxtaposition of fiction and fantasy, in its strong ecological
messages, and in the unexpectedly unsentimental working out of the plot.

On balance, I think "A Plague of Angels" to be one of Tepper's weaker
books.  It's ambitious, but disappointing.  The conclusion is clever,
but too arbitrary.  And Tepper flaunts her myth-making; it's too obvious.
Tepper's weaker books can still be worth reading, but I wouldn't rush.

%A  Tepper, Sheri S.
%T  A Plague of Angels
%D  October, 1993
%I  Bantam Spectra
%G  ISBN 0-553-09513-7
%O  $21.95 U.S/$26.95 CDN
%P  423 pages

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

   'T is with our judgements as our watches, none
   Go alike, yet each believes his own
		--Alexander Pope