Let's start by determining what this book is not:1. It is not accurately described by the back cover copy on my edition, which says,"Alldera was a Fem, and she knew the horrors of the Holdfast, where labor fems and breeding fems were treated worse than beasts."She knew the legends of the free fems who roamed the scorched plains beyond the Wild."And she knew what she had to do."This is not a book focused on Alldera or on the experience of the Fems themselves. This is not a book about the free fems living in the Wild (in reality or in legend). This is not a book about Alldera's plan to do "what she had to do." Actually, Alldera doesn't get any real attention until the fourth section of the book and even then the focus is less on her experiences and feelings and more on how she is able to impact one of the male characters. Her plan, hinted at as a major part of the book, is in reality only a minor part of the book and one that comes and goes fairly quickly. I had hoped that the book would be more about Alldera and the fems' situation; it appears that I will have to read Motherline, the next book in the series, in order to get that. The actual focus of Charnas's Walk to the End of the World is more interesting than the hinted-at adventure story even though it is less about the women of this post-apocalyptic world and more about the men in power and how they struggle with, challenge, or are shaped by the societal rules that give them power and create fems as a separate and unequal class. 2. This book is not, as one reviewer on Amazon argues, "a misandryist [sic] ideological tract." This reviewer writes,"Most of "Walk to the End of the World" is told from a male perspective, but because it is first and foremost a misandryist ideological tract, Charnas forces her male characters into simplistic clichés of what radical feminism believes men to be: violent, hierarchical, and dysfunctional. The ecological disaster of the "Wasting", which sets up Charnas' nightmarish future, was solely the fault of men (specifically white men, of course), as is pretty much every other bad thing that happens in the book. Men fail at everything in the Holdfast, even homosexual love, and most of the time they blame women for these failures. This unrealistic view of men cripples "Walk to the End of the World" by making the male characters one-dimensional and uninteresting. They exist only to oppress the "fems", and the book seems to take an almost perverse pleasure in bringing some new and pointless male atrocity to light in almost every chapter. Instead of exploring the fascinating potential it has for father-son conflict or male friendship with other males, "Walk to the End of the World" dwells obsessively on showing men to be cruel, superstitious, and stupid. In addition, the book presents women solely as eternal victims of men, smarter and more moral because of the oppression they suffer. The only character who is at all interesting is Alldera, whose perspective we only see near the end of the book."This is only worth bringing up because it is not an accurate description of the book and because this kind of miserading is not limited to this one reviewer. Walk to the End of the World does arise from the radical feminist movement of the 1970s, but radical feminist does not equal anti-men and Charnas's book is far from misandrist. The situation in which the book is set relies heavily on sexist conceptions of gender roles and abilities, but Charnas actually spends a lot of time throughout this novel complicating the social and cultural divisions that have developed through Holdfast's history. These divisions place men over women, humans over animals, white over nonwhite, age over youth, etc., and are a fundamental part of the belief system of the Holdfast survivors. But many question these fundamentals. Of the major characters (Captain Kelmz, Servan D Layo, Eykar Bek, and Alldera), none wholeheartedly embrace these divisions. Some accept the misogyny of the culture but challenge the division between human and animal or young and old, while others, specifically Eykar Bek, challenge the division between male and female itself. These characters, male and female alike, are more than mere ciphers for Charnas's feminist ideology; they are fleshed out characters with weaknesses and strengths. That is what makes this book truly interesting.As a final note, and a final quote from the Amazon review mentioned above, I want to consider this book's relation to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. This particular Amazon reviewer says,"If you want a book that seethes with unproductive rage, "Walk to the End of the World" is just the thing; if you want a terrifying look at misogyny run amuck, I'd suggest Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" instead."Clearly, I'm not going to agree with this statement, since I don't see Charnas's book as "seeth[ing] witih unproductive rage," but the two books, though they deal with similar situations (a future world in which women have no power and are merely used for breeding and work) approach these worlds in quite different ways. It might be an interesting project to teach the two side by side and ask students which they find more effective and why. Atwood tells her story through the perspective of one of the women in the society and provides little insight into the male mindset; she also incorporates religion into her dystopian world as a means of oppression, where Charnas's means of oppression resemble much more the logic of slavery (dehumanization of the Other, breeding for better workers and more docile slaves, etc.) and does not deal explicitly with religion. The fact that these two authors can make such a similar argument about the possible oppressive future of mid-century gender roles and use such different modes of justification for this future (economic versus religious) says a lot about how widespread these gender attitudes have been in Western culture and how close we may have come (and may yet come) to seeing one of those futures come true.
I thought that this was a very good book even though I was initially prejudiced against it by the praise of a nameless critic whose views I don't particularly respect. The writing is excellent, and the melodramatic premise (that the men of the post-apocalyptic future blame “the Wasting” on the witchery of women, now degraded to a strictly separate caste of “fems” in the survivor society of the Holdfast) isn’t oppressive because SMC constructs the first two thirds of the novel from the point of view of male characters: Captain Kelmz, D Layo, and Eykar Bek. Even with all their creepiness and misogyny they come alive and we have to see them as human because of the orchestration of the point of view. Then when the narrative switches to the perspective of Alldera, who is something like the heroine, what we experience is an added texture rather than a controlling point of view. One very interesting novum here is the premise that society is based on extreme hostility between old men and young. SMC carries this so far that in the Holdfast paternity is unknown on the grounds that knowledge of the connection between father and son would lead to murder. In fact the gist of the plot is that Eykar Bek is known to his father as he also knows of his father. Most of the action involves his journey to find his father in order to confront him somehow or other. Having said all these nice things about this book I must register extreme disappointment, not so much in the ending per se as in the way it is engineered. Eykar’s father, Raff Maggomas, turns out to be a particularly tiresome Man Who Knows (so familiar in SF) and spends paragraphs explaining his plan to breed specially inferior fems who can then be used as a food source. Luckily Eykar has been having real conversations with Alldera so he doesn’t think this is a very good idea. He kills Dad with a well-placed punch in the nose, arranges for Dad’s new model city of ‘Troi to fall to invaders, and tells Alldera to head for the hills and freedom. So, all in all, a pleasant discovery. I will certainly read more of SMC’s stuff.
Do You like book Walk To The End Of The World (1974)?
The book takes place many generations after a world-ending event called the Wasting, wherein all of mankind's natural resources ran out and the majority of the world's population died, along with most larger animals.In the settlement called Holdfast, society is broken up in two key ways; first by age, Seniors and Juniors, who each have specific roles and rarely interact with each other in any way that isn't antagonistic, and secondly, by gender.In the world of the story the Wasting is now blamed on women (called fems in the novel), who were thought to be the cause of the end of the old world and have now been reduced to labour and breeding animals, not actually considered creature with souls or any value except their necessary function in continuing the human race.As a man raised in a house of women, who has since moved into his own house (and filled it with his wife and daughters) reading the book was a bizarre experience for me, the author does a great job at creating the society and all of its rules, and by breaking the book into smaller parts and focusing each on a different character, the reader is able to get a very good idea of how this world works.The book was followed by three sequels: Motherlines (1978), The Furies (1994), and The Conqueror's Child (1999), all of which have now been added to my list of books I hope to read this year.A little dated in concept and writing style, but definitely a worthwhile read.
—Kirk Macleod
This book is a fun read - by a feminist, lesbian author - that begins a series of 4 speculative fiction books. They all take place in world post-nuclear-apocalypse that is fragmented and lacking most of the pre-apocalptic technology, societal structures, food sources, and borders. This first book in the series (written in the 70s, and very second-wave-feminismy) takes place in a small nation/society that has no contact with other societies outside their borders. They are the descendants of some high-ranking military officials who bunkered-down with their families when they saw things were going bad and the result is a current society that is structured around a kind of bastardized military hierarchy in which women are enslaved and blamed for the war and for all evil in the world. The male hierarchy is organized and policed strictly by an age ranking system. The book takes place following several years of famine, in which we get the sense that things may be reaching a boiling point. The book follows a group of three men who are on a journey together and who are all peripheral/marginal to the society in some way (which makes their perspectives quite interesting). Then the final section of the book is from a woman's point of view (who has been accompanying them but who is discussed very little up to that point) who gives us a totally new perspective on another culture (fem culture) within the society. The next book takes place in a different (nomadic, matriarchal) society outside the borders of the Holdfast. Really interesting book, though it is starting to show it's age. Made me anxious to read the rest for sure!
—Sam Benson
