jethrien

One last review, slightly belated (finished the book yesterday, didn't have time to post):

Title: The Firebrand
Author: Marion Zimmer Bradley
Genre: Fantasy/historical fiction/myth revision (Ancient Greek)
Thingummies: 2.5

Synopsis: A feminist revision of the Iliad, from Kassandra's point of view.

Thoughts: Marion Zimmer Bradley rewrote the Arthurian legends from a feminist perspective in The Mists of Avalon; Ursula K. Le Guin did it for the Aeneid in Lavinia. While this isn't terrible, both of those books were more successful than this one.

In the frame to this story, an aged Kassandra insists that a bard is telling the story of the fall of Troy is all wrong--in the previous generation, women had ruled cities and lived in harmony with the Goddess and everything was hugs and puppies until men totally screwed everything up. The first couple chapters verge on shrill, and then things calm down a bit and people become slightly less caricature-ish. But throughout the book, all conflicts between women seem to be men's fault, while all conflicts between men are men's fault (or the Gods of men) and all the conflicts between men and women are...men's fault. If only they had stayed with a matriarchal society worshipping the Mother Goddess, everything would have been perfect. Stupid men.

As the characters develop a bit, it gets more interesting. There's some clever reworkings of various events (and the treatment of the wooden horse makes a lot more sense than the original, I'll admit). I liked the portrayal of Ahkilles and his death. And I did quite like Kassandra herself.

But the ending let me down again. Bradley doesn't seem to have the courage to stick to her convictions. Kassandra insists that she can be fulfilled without a man or a child...and yet she ends up with a lover and a kid and it makes her so very fulfilled. (And I really can't figure out why the kid needs to exist at all, from a narrative perspective.) The exact relationship between the old and new gods is never explained properly, which makes it hard to figure out what the themes are supposed to mean. The only decent man in the entire book is Aeneas--which doesn't work for me, given some of his actions in the Aeneid. (I would have accepted a complex man, but he's just simply good and perfectly virtuous here.) And while I hesistate to use the phrase "deus ex machina" in a book that does heavily feature divine intervention, the ending comes out of nowhere and completely undermines the overarching message that women don't need men to create cities for them.

So while there's some bits of writing here I enjoyed, I feel like this is nowhere near as strong as some of Bradley's other work.