Subject: Review: WINTERLONG by Elizabeth Hand

From: [email-masked]
Date: 20 Aug 91 22:40:15 GMT

WINTERLONG
			by Elizabeth Hand
		Review Copyright (c) 1991 Alan Wexelblat

%A Elizabeth Hand
%T Winterlong
%I Spectra Special Editions
%I Bantam/Spectra
%C New York
%O paperback, US$4.95
%G ISBN 0-553-28772
%D 1990

In a post-holocaust Washington, D.C. two twins are separated at birth.  One,
an autistic girl, is given over to scientists who cure her autism by a
series of drug treatments and a surgery that cuts out her emotional heart.
Wendy cannot feel, in the sense of "feeling remorse" or "feeling hatred."
What she can do is tap into the feelings, thoughts and memories of others.
She provides a kind of emotional mirror for other people, most of whom
cannot stand to see themselves thus stripped.  After sessions hooked in with
Wendy, people have a disturbing tendency to kill themselves.  Wendy cannot
seem to succeed in treating the emotional disorders that bring people to her
in the first place.

The other twin, a beautiful boy, is raised to be a whore.  He inspires love
and lust by his very appearance, and his life is dedicated to the service of
patrons who reward him with trinket favors.  Raphael is Wendy's antithesis
in that he is nothing but feelings.  People use him to mask their own
feelings, thoughts and memories.  As long as he maintains his skills, his
beauty, and his youth -- and remembers that his Patrons are the ones with
real power -- he cannot fail.

The story of WINTERLONG (at one level) concerns the evolution and meeting of
these two archetypes.  Each grows and changes throughout the book, ending up
as something completely unexpected.

This is a tough book to review, on several grounds.  First, it is a post-
apocalypse book and I generally hate post-apocalypse books.  But this one
takes place so long after the apocalypse that it's hard to classify it with
other such works.  Second, it's a first novel.  First novels are supposed to
have flaws, areas where the writer can improve.  It almost feels unfair to
point these out, because I don't want to stop anyone from buying this book
and encouraging Hand to write more.  But the book does suffer from several
first-novel kinds of errors: Hand lays on vivid description at one critical
moment, then shies away the next, as if the story had gotten out of her
control.  It's also too long.

Third, this is tough because the book is a non-traditional narrative; in
many ways it's playing a different game than traditional storytelling books
and it may be unfair to grade them on the same scale.  Hand begins the book
with an italicized sentence: "Our heart stops," heralding switches between
past and present tense, and a deliberate blurring of the sense of who
exactly is telling the story.  The sense of identity -- who we are and how
we figure that out -- is an important theme throughout the novel.

And last this is tough because the story is so rich, so steeped in legend
and mythos, so full of deliberate ambiguities, and written on so many
levels, that it's entirely possible I've missed Hand's central point.

What I am sure of is that Hand has clearly done her homework; she handles
legend, myth, history, and a smattering of science competently.  What makes
this book worthwhile is that it is a challenge, an assertion that Good can
beat Evil without having to resort to methods which make the two sides
indistinguishable.  Read it for yourself and see if you agree.