Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter
After the apocalypse the world is neatly divided.
Rational civilization rests with the Professors in their steel and concrete villages; marauding tribes of Barbarians roam the surrounding jungles; mutilated Out People inhabit the burnt scars of cities.
But Marianne, a Professor's daughter, is carried away into the jungle--a grotesque vegetable paradise--where she will become the captive bride of Jewel, the proud and beautiful Barbarian. There she will witness the savage rituals of the snake worshippers, indulge her voluptuous, virginal fantasies, taste the forbidden fruit of chaos...
Erotic, exotic, and bizarre, HEROES AND VILLAINS is a post-apocalyptic romance, a gripping adventure story, a colourful embroidery of religion and magic and, not least, a dispassionate vision of life beyond our brave nuclear world.
This book made me so angry I went out and picked a fight with my boyfriend after reading it because I couldn't yell at the characters who had the discourtesy to not exist or the author who had the discourtesy to die in 1992. I haven't had a book piss me off this much in a long, long time. I'm tempted to give it the Ladies of Missalonghi treatment--putting it under the back tires of my car and running over it repeatedly--but I live in an apartment complex and someone might pick it up and throw it away before I can pulverize it to my satisfaction.
Let's start with the minor annoyances first. This is a post-apocalyptic novel published in the late 1960s. There are certain aspects of this genre that I was fully prepared for, one of which is the passive flowery language that clouds the reality of the world the characters are living in. This book took it to extremes by adding a layer of pseudo-intellectualism. Maybe it was real intellectualism, maybe I just don't know enough about sociology to recognize the Really Deep Insights I was supposed to be getting about decaying societies (I've heard of Levi-Strauss, a name that the characters kept throwing around, but I know nothing of his work), but all I know is that it was getting pretty damn pretentious after a while. Pretentiousness is one of the worst offenses any novel or movie can commit in my world so this book is already starting off on a low bar.
Here's an example of the pretentious language that set me off so much:
"Apart from these stray contacts, she defended herself by denying him an existence outside the dual being they made while owls pounced on velvet mice in the forest, the moon passed through its phases and the idiot boy howled disconsolately in his kennel. This third thing, this erotic beast, was eyeless, formless and equipped with one single mouth. It was amphibious and swam in black, brackish waters, subsisting only upon night and silence; she closed her eyes in case she glimpsed it by moonlight and there were no words of endearment in common, anyway, nor any reason to use them. The beast had teeth and claws. It was sometimes an instrument solely of vengefulness, though often its own impetus carried it beyond this function. When it separated out to themselves, again, they woke to the mutual distrust of the morning."
That, dear readers, is a sex scene.
I was prepared for the importance of sex to the plot after reading the back cover blurb and checking the publication date (1969). In one of Anne McCaffrey's books, I think it was Get Off the Unicorn, she prefaces one of her short stories with a note that in the late 1960s you had to include a sex scene if you wanted to get published in the science fiction world. The blurb mentions Marianne's "virginal fantasies," so I knew going in that she was going to have lots of hot barbarian sex. What I did not know was that it was going to be hot barbarian rape fantasies.
Here's a good indicator of how the times, they are a-changin': when Marianne tries to escape from the barbarian camp, she is easily tracked down by Jewel. She sits in a tree while he mocks her until she gets mad enough to jump down and fight him. He pins her down, rapes her, and then tells her that now they have to get married. She's more angry than anything after this, but it's okay because deep down she really wanted him to rape her. She likes it rough. After their marriage, she goes into a kind of fugue state where she only really comes alive at night when they're having another bout of rough sex (see the above quote). It gets so obvious that she really loves being raped that at one point, when she's arguing with Jewel, he looks at her and says "You're creaming for me now, this very minute." I, personally, found that to be unnecessarily vulgar. Marianne totally gets off on it, though. She's always telling Jewel "I hate you," but it becomes clear near the end that she really means "love" instead of "hate." Because, you know, a semi-abusive sexual relationship is just so romantic.
Eventually Marianne gets pregnant and tries to cheat on Jewel by raping the thirteen-year-old "half-wit" of the tribe (I guess it's contagious). At this point I gave up on any hope of this book ever making any kind of good sense. Jewel hits Marianne a couple of times and this is portrayed as worse than any of the raping*. The third time he hits her, she puts a "curse" on him and he dies in a suicide rescue mission. When she learns that Jewel is dead, Marianne declares that she will become the "Tiger Queen" and rule the tribe with an iron fist. Suuuuuuuuuure she is. The girl that everyone in the tribe hates, the girl that has people making signs to ward off the evil eye whenever they see her, the girl who can't even take care of herself in the wild, she is going to be the next leader of the tribe. She's going to be left for the mutants to eat in a week.
*Important note: Hitting and raping are both horrible ways to treat a woman--or a man. I just think it's a strange place to put the demarcation line between okay and not okay: rape her all you want, but once you hit her, that's it. I put this note here in case a pedant wanders by and wants to argue with me. I've been on the internet a while, you see. I know how it often goes.
Rational civilization rests with the Professors in their steel and concrete villages; marauding tribes of Barbarians roam the surrounding jungles; mutilated Out People inhabit the burnt scars of cities.
But Marianne, a Professor's daughter, is carried away into the jungle--a grotesque vegetable paradise--where she will become the captive bride of Jewel, the proud and beautiful Barbarian. There she will witness the savage rituals of the snake worshippers, indulge her voluptuous, virginal fantasies, taste the forbidden fruit of chaos...
Erotic, exotic, and bizarre, HEROES AND VILLAINS is a post-apocalyptic romance, a gripping adventure story, a colourful embroidery of religion and magic and, not least, a dispassionate vision of life beyond our brave nuclear world.
This book made me so angry I went out and picked a fight with my boyfriend after reading it because I couldn't yell at the characters who had the discourtesy to not exist or the author who had the discourtesy to die in 1992. I haven't had a book piss me off this much in a long, long time. I'm tempted to give it the Ladies of Missalonghi treatment--putting it under the back tires of my car and running over it repeatedly--but I live in an apartment complex and someone might pick it up and throw it away before I can pulverize it to my satisfaction.
Let's start with the minor annoyances first. This is a post-apocalyptic novel published in the late 1960s. There are certain aspects of this genre that I was fully prepared for, one of which is the passive flowery language that clouds the reality of the world the characters are living in. This book took it to extremes by adding a layer of pseudo-intellectualism. Maybe it was real intellectualism, maybe I just don't know enough about sociology to recognize the Really Deep Insights I was supposed to be getting about decaying societies (I've heard of Levi-Strauss, a name that the characters kept throwing around, but I know nothing of his work), but all I know is that it was getting pretty damn pretentious after a while. Pretentiousness is one of the worst offenses any novel or movie can commit in my world so this book is already starting off on a low bar.
Here's an example of the pretentious language that set me off so much:
"Apart from these stray contacts, she defended herself by denying him an existence outside the dual being they made while owls pounced on velvet mice in the forest, the moon passed through its phases and the idiot boy howled disconsolately in his kennel. This third thing, this erotic beast, was eyeless, formless and equipped with one single mouth. It was amphibious and swam in black, brackish waters, subsisting only upon night and silence; she closed her eyes in case she glimpsed it by moonlight and there were no words of endearment in common, anyway, nor any reason to use them. The beast had teeth and claws. It was sometimes an instrument solely of vengefulness, though often its own impetus carried it beyond this function. When it separated out to themselves, again, they woke to the mutual distrust of the morning."
That, dear readers, is a sex scene.
I was prepared for the importance of sex to the plot after reading the back cover blurb and checking the publication date (1969). In one of Anne McCaffrey's books, I think it was Get Off the Unicorn, she prefaces one of her short stories with a note that in the late 1960s you had to include a sex scene if you wanted to get published in the science fiction world. The blurb mentions Marianne's "virginal fantasies," so I knew going in that she was going to have lots of hot barbarian sex. What I did not know was that it was going to be hot barbarian rape fantasies.
Here's a good indicator of how the times, they are a-changin': when Marianne tries to escape from the barbarian camp, she is easily tracked down by Jewel. She sits in a tree while he mocks her until she gets mad enough to jump down and fight him. He pins her down, rapes her, and then tells her that now they have to get married. She's more angry than anything after this, but it's okay because deep down she really wanted him to rape her. She likes it rough. After their marriage, she goes into a kind of fugue state where she only really comes alive at night when they're having another bout of rough sex (see the above quote). It gets so obvious that she really loves being raped that at one point, when she's arguing with Jewel, he looks at her and says "You're creaming for me now, this very minute." I, personally, found that to be unnecessarily vulgar. Marianne totally gets off on it, though. She's always telling Jewel "I hate you," but it becomes clear near the end that she really means "love" instead of "hate." Because, you know, a semi-abusive sexual relationship is just so romantic.
Eventually Marianne gets pregnant and tries to cheat on Jewel by raping the thirteen-year-old "half-wit" of the tribe (I guess it's contagious). At this point I gave up on any hope of this book ever making any kind of good sense. Jewel hits Marianne a couple of times and this is portrayed as worse than any of the raping*. The third time he hits her, she puts a "curse" on him and he dies in a suicide rescue mission. When she learns that Jewel is dead, Marianne declares that she will become the "Tiger Queen" and rule the tribe with an iron fist. Suuuuuuuuuure she is. The girl that everyone in the tribe hates, the girl that has people making signs to ward off the evil eye whenever they see her, the girl who can't even take care of herself in the wild, she is going to be the next leader of the tribe. She's going to be left for the mutants to eat in a week.
*Important note: Hitting and raping are both horrible ways to treat a woman--or a man. I just think it's a strange place to put the demarcation line between okay and not okay: rape her all you want, but once you hit her, that's it. I put this note here in case a pedant wanders by and wants to argue with me. I've been on the internet a while, you see. I know how it often goes.