Review: Winterlong, by Elizabeth Hand

Review: Winterlong, by Elizabeth Hand

by Rich Horton

Winterlong, from 1990, was Elizabeth Hand's first novel. (Her first story appeared in 1988, but I didn't really become aware of her until "Snow on Sugar Mountain" (1991), and it was really "Last Summer at Mars Hill" (1994) and "Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol" (2000) that clinched the deal. Since then, she's become a favorite, with stories like "Cleopatra Brimstone", "Illyria", "Near Zennor", "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerephon", and novels like Wylding Hall, Curious Toys, and Waking the Moon. But I still hadn't read her first three novels, a trilogy, Winterlong, Æstival Tide, and Icarus Descending. So when Readercon decided to have a panel on those novels this year, it was time to read them.

My copy of Winterlong is a 1997 reprint, from Harper Collins, with an afterword by Hand, which tells quite interestingly of the germination of the book. It is as I said a first novel -- with both the energy you expect, and some of the faults. But on balance it's a fabulous first novel. It's set in a post-apocalyptic future, in which there have been two previous "Ascensions" -- the nature of them unclear. The world as we see it is a mess.

It's one of those novels that drops you into its setting without telling you anything. This makes it hard going at the first, but before long it speeds up, and by the end the mysteries and ambiguities are a feature. We open with Wendy Wanders, an autistic girl (it is said) aged 17, who has been raised from a young age at the Human Engineering Laboratory (HEL), where she has been subjected to invasive brain surgery, and many experiments (and drugs.) This has made her an empath -- she can absorb emotions and memories from other people, either with an electical connection, or by tasting their blood. She believes she has no emotions of her own. She is also haunted by dreams or visions of a boy in a tree -- a hanged boy, perhaps, and has some intimation of a twin brother of her own. And, worse, her empathic connections seem to cause some people to commit suicide. As the facility in which she lives is taken over by a new staff loyal to the the mad Aviator Tast'Annin, who is the new Governor of the City, the doctor who has treated her most of her life has also committed suicide, and there are threats that Wendy's powers will be weaponized for a coming war..

The focus shifts to Raphael Miramar, a Paphian in the City, a City that is increasingly a dangerous place, with its new Governor and impending war, with the periodic viral strikes ("rains of roses"), with lazars and aardmen roaming the environs and kidnapping or killing anyone they can get to. The Paphians are prostitutes, members of several Houses. Raphael is, for now, the most prized catamite of House Miramar, having been adopted when young, though his twin sister, who never spoke, was sent away and is presumed dead. He is 17, and it's made clear that Paphians age out quickly. And he has decided to leave the House, for the patronage of a Curator, Roland. He hopes, while at the Curator's place -- a museum, of course -- he can actually gain some learning. And indeed he meets a woman who lets him help with her duties, and they begin to become close -- but that relationship comes to a shocking end. And we realize that Raphael too is plagued with dreams of a boy in a tree, and a sense that he is somehow an agent of Death. 

Readers will gather quickly that Raphael's missing twin is Wendy. And soon Wendy has escaped HEL in the company of an Aide, Justice, a member of a Paphian family, who is in love with her. Likewise Raphael is soon cast aside by his patron, and he finds himself at loose in the City, captured by lazars, and ready to confront Roland at the next chance he gets. Wendy and Justice find their way to a company of players (including an uplifted chimpanzee, Miss Scarlet Pan, who is the leading lady.) They put on old dramas (mostly Shakespeare.) Wendy is being searched for by the mad Aviator Tast'annin, and so disguises herself as a boy -- and is quickly confused for Raphael. Inevitably the fates of the two are entwined, and will converge eventually, and resolve the mystery of the Boy in the Tree while bringing Tast'annin's plans either to fruition or frustration.

The story is beautiful and horrifying. Death stalks the narrative, and death is easy and common in the City (which is readily recognizable as Washington, D. C.) I should say both sex and death are common, and often linked -- the prostitutes are abused as part of their expected roles, and are used sexually from very young ages, with the sex often violent. But there are many other ways to die in the City, and it's clear that life is similarly parlous throughout the rest of the geography of this future age. The prose is very lush, mostly to very good effect, especially in the final scenes, in which some passages are gorgeous and powerful. The novel is suffused with tragedy, and this never fails to wrench the reader. Important characters die in the first few pages, and at the end -- sometimes at the hands of our heroes, sometimes cruelly at the hands of villains, sometimes randomly. 

I'll quote one beautiful passage: "And there came to me then a great sound, the sound of singing. And I saw all of them, Emma and Aidan, Gligor and Merle and Anna, Dr. Silverthorn and Toby Rhymer, a white dog with eyes like burning ice and a girl who wanted to fly like finches, all of them like lights dancing in the air. With them shrilled the voices of the lazars, like wounds bleeding song, all of them crying out to me. Loudest of all was the piercing cry of a boy with fair tangled hair and green eyes, his hands streaming through the darkness like the purest moonlight and his eyes like burning stars." ("Wounds bleeding song" -- what a glorious image.)

It's not a perfect book. There are passages that drag a bit, and the strategy of telling the reader nothing, though appropriate, does make it hard to follow at times. That said, solving the mysteries, figuring out what the Ascensions were, and what the lazars are, and the aardmen, and the geneslaves, and so on, is enjoyable. The overall conflict is difficult to rationalize -- and perhaps that's only to be expected, but it does sometimes try the reader's patience. But all that is minor, and in the end this is a lovely and moving book, and the harbinger of a brilliant career -- which was indeed realized.