From archive (archive)
Subject: WINTER'S DAUGHTER by Charles Whitmore
From: ecl@mtgzy.UUCP (Evelyn C. Leeper)
Organization: AT&T, Middletown NJ
Date: 11 Aug 87 02:09:08 GMT




		    WINTER'S DAUGHTER by Charles Whitmore
		 Timescape, 1984, ISBN 0-671-49984-X, $14.95.
		      A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
		       Copyright 1987 Evelyn C. Leeper

     There are a lot of post-nuclear-holocaust books these days, but no
others like this one.  Face it, how many novels of any genre are written in
the style of a Scandinavian saga?

     This book was recommended at Readercon.  The person recommending it
talked about its lack of commercial success, which he attributed to the fact
that readers who picked it up didn't realize they were reading a modern
Scandinavian saga, and felt the style too episodic and terse.  By the way, I
call this style Scandinavian for lack of a better term.  Most of the sagas
known today in this country are Icelandic, yet this book could not be called
Icelandic.  Calling it a "Viking saga" doesn't seem right either.  All in
all, "Scandinavian saga" seems the most neutral term.

     Divided into three major sections, the story covers the life of Signe
Ragnhilds-datter and her family in the years following Ragnarok, a.k.a. the
Twilight of the Gods, a.k.a. World War III.  Signe was born in Africa
shortly after the war, to a Norwegian mother and an American father who were
there when war broke out.  Africa was spared most of the destruction and
aftermath of the war, but Europeans and Americans were looked upon with
distrust and her early life was not easy.  Eventually she and her children
leave Africa and travel to America and eventually to their home in Norway.
The episodes average between one and two pages each.  You could think of it
as learning about someone's experiences by looking at individual snapshots
from a scrapbook or by hearing them describe isolated incidents.  It's very
much the way the movies work, yet in novel form, most readers find it
awkward and stilted.

     The introduction, like the introduction to Margaret Atwood's HANDMAID'S
TALE, is written from the perspective of a scholar of the novel's future.
In this case, the writer talks about how the style of this novel makes it
more accessible to the readers of his present, a comment which can only seem
ironic in view of the novel's apparent inaccessibility to the readers of
ours.

     The episodic nature of the story allows Whitmore to cover a lot of time
and territory in a couple of hundred pages.  He can give us glimpses into
many different aspects of post-holocaust society: the enclaves that are set
up, the reinstatement of trade and international relationships, the
attitudes of people towards strangers.  He shows us sketches; we need to
fill in the details.  In spite of this, the characters come alive.  They
have depth and seem very real, not the caricatures you might expect from the
terse style.  Whitmore manages to avoid being harpooned by the limitations
of his medium.  Even though I have not read a lot of Scandinavian sagas, I
found this book enjoyable and would recommend it.  If you have some
background knowledge of sagas, you will probably appreciate this even more.

					Evelyn C. Leeper
					(201) 957-2070
				UUCP:	ihnp4!mtgzy!ecl
				ARPA:	mtgzy!ecl@rutgers.rutgers.edu