My review of The Shattered Chain, the first book in The Saga of the Renunciates, was actually more like a sporking in two parts. This time, my reflections of Thendara House are going to be closer to a review. However, still BEWARE HEAVY SPOILERS, please.
Have you ever had an impression that some fantasy/sci-fi books are much more about daily life than their authors pretend they are? I’ve had such a vibe many times, and I actually like it, because there’s no more exciting thing to me than learning how ordinary life looks like on an alien world. And Thendara House is such a book, full of daily things, when action and adventure begin literally on the last seventy pages or so of a nearly five hundred-paged book. And I don’t find it a cheat or a disappointment. I was actually very glad to explore more of Darkovan and Terran customs than of intrigues and mountain voyages.
In this book, Magda Lorne, a Darkovan-born Terran, is schooled in Thendara Guildhouse of the Renunciates. Jaelle, a Renunciate, lives in the Terran base with her husband, Magda’s ex called Peter Haldane, also a Darkovan-raised Terran. So, as you can easily see, there’ll be a lot about culture clash here, about prejudices and preconceptions. And, suprisingly, the theme of race is introduced with the arrival of Cholayna Ares, a dark-skinned agent of Terran Empire.
While I think that Cholayna is a well-drawn and not tokenistic character (one of my favourite ones, actually), it seems to me also that some tropes concerning her are just awkward. And it all boils down to the fact that Bradley has decided to make Darkover a world which is homogenously HWITE. Oh, wait, it’s better than white. It’s Caucasian. And I know that in a book published in the 1980’s such a word might have been used, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was coined by the late eighteen-century pseudo-scientists who considered Europeans to be superior to any other “races”. As as we’ve learnt through genetic research of the recent decades, race doesn’t exist as a scientific thing. It’s only a social construct, a thing we’ve invented.
Back to Darkover, it’s quite telling that a planet colonized by Scots, Irish people and Spaniards is “homogenously white”. Because of course they must have been Spanish Spaniards, not Latin-American people who often have some Black or Indigenous ancestors. Latin American people in the space? That was unimaginable for Bradley. And that’s why any attempts to introduce diversity into her universe may come out as awkward.
People assuming that Cholayna’s dark skin is a sign of sickness or being a half-breed human are cringy. And when you know the context of dehumanizing Black people and mixed-race people, it’s even cringier. It doesn’t get worse only because what Cholayna faces on Darkover isn’t systemic. It’s more like Black people were treated in, let’s say, medieval Europe. They were a rare sight to the locals and although at first otherized, they could have been accepted over time. And that’s what happens to Cholayna. She makes friends among the Darkovan women who, eventually, begin to understand that on other worlds, people can have other skin colours. But it’s still telling that even in Medieval times in Europe, people were aware that Black people exist; just look at the legend of Sir Morien or at how Saint Maurice was depicted in Germany. Darkover, meanwhile, is so homogenous that literally unaware of the existence of non-white people. And if you’re curious, Cholayna isn’t a Terran. She was born on Alpha, a hot planet. Because, you know, only on an all-hot planet there can be dark-skinned people. Black people from Terra, Indigenous people from Terra, Asian people from Terra? Who cares…
Still, there are many tropes and plots which ring very true in this novel. The most interesting to me was the story of the brief marriage between Peter and Jaelle, and of cultural and social limitations behind it. There are so many convincing and true things there: Jaelle being fetishized by the Terrans as a “native” wife of one of their finest agents, Terran women who aren’t liberated as much as Darkovan people previosly thought (even at work), invisible barriers of gender and authority, and in all of this, Peter. Peter who isn’t evil or villainous, but who becomes more and more bossy and demanding, wanting a child to satisfy his pride, and wanting Jaelle to be a “proper” wife who won’t make him ashamed before his co-workers. Whether these dark elements are more up to his Darkovan upbringing or to the still surprisingly and covertly patriarchal Terran standards, we are free to judge. But it is so convincing, to see a marriage born out of infatuation burning out under the weight of social norms.
However, I think also that Terran Empire as described by Bradley is so much technocratic and sterile that it becomes sketchy. It rings more like the 1950’s science fiction than the later one. Interstellar commonwealths and and how the Earth may fit into it? You’d better check it at LeGuin’s and her cycle about Hain, really.
And there’s the other side of culture-clash: Magda at Thendara Guildhouse of the Renunciates. And, honestly, as I was reading about it, I wasn’t sure if all the elements of the Renunciates’ culture had aged well. On the one hand, I like that there’s an atmosphere of sisterhood in the book, that women support each other, and that they are allowed to define their femininity themselves, unfiltered through the male-gaze. The Renunciates, though stereotypically perceived as warriors, are many other people, such as midwives, craftswomen, trip-advisors, and all those jobs are hinted or explored in the novel. However, the warring part of the guild takes a strange path, honestly. I’m tired of their social codes based on being always more honourable and more composed than men. From the fighting Renunciates, it is demanded that they would always fight honourably and never provoke men with their clothes or behaviour. And this is an unhealthy mixture of victim-blaiming and thinking that when in an unequal position, you need to be always more pure than the one who holds systemic power in your society. You may say that Bradley just shows the brutal truth about independent women trying to survive in a patriarchal world, but the Renunciates set boundaries on themselves from within, and somehow, I don’t wonder that Magda is quite shocked and rebellious about it for a long time.
Still, I am aware that as for a science fantasy 1980’s book to get a story almost only about women, a story where women are just heroines, protagonists, human beings with their own aims and doubts, must have been innovative and important. Especially that within the course of action, LGBT+ threads grow from a backstage queer-baiting to the description of actual and convincing relationships. Women in this novel fall in love and break up, they discover their sexuality and the wishes of their hearts, which leads, eventually, to Magda and Jaelle being together as freemates. And honestly, it was a pay-off I’d been waiting for, and one of the rare moments in fantasy and science-fiction literature when love between women is explored.
And there’s another theme which actualy surprised me positively, because, at last, we get the class question being raised, even if the solving of Darkovan social problems comes from a group of generous nobs who’ve decided that every person bestowed with laran can be trained, no matter their social position and birth. Among them, there’s Damon Ridenow from an old well-born family, Andrew Carr, a Terran who took and identity of a Comyn lord, and their wives, Ellemir and Callista from the house of Alton. They are actually characters from other Bradley’s books, and although they set up their Forbidden Tower mainly as an act of defiance against Leonie Hastur, a powerful Keeper who’d trained both Damon and Callista, here, in this book, their magical/psionic activism is rebrandished as anti-Comyn and anti-feudal. And I’m happy, of course, that the noble houses of Darkover and their hegemony are at last criticised. But, again, the faces of resistance are mostly well-born people, or, speaking of Andrew and Magda joining them, people with cultural capital. You’ll see more glimpses of ordinary people’s life in the thread focused on Thendara Guildhouse (some common-born women have acquired quite a high position there), actually, than in descriptions of Callista, Ellemir, and their happy Forbidden Tower and happy polyamorous family. And although so far I’ve complained that polyamory as described by Bradley isn’t liberating, I can only tell you that in the Renunciates novels, she avoided this trap. Here, the whole thing is, at last, brought down to love, trust and friendship between several people loving each other and caring for their children. So let’s forget how the whole relationship began in The Forbiden Tower novel, because it was more like “Callista can’t have sex with Andrew now, but menalways need sex, so, Ellemir, can you have sex with him, please?”
So far, Thendara House is my favourite novel in the trilogy about the Renunciates, and one of my favourite novels about Darkover. It’s complicated, nuanced and convincing, and it almost never simplifies cultural relation the way they were simplified in The Shattered Chain. It also offers a rare anti-classist narrative in this universe, even if from the modern perspective, many things in this book could have been done better.
Left Hand of Fiction 