WASHINGTON POST 2003

Queen of Hearts; A rousing fictional account of the ancient monarch's life and loves.

12/21/2003

CLEOPATRA DISMOUNTS

By Carmen Boullosa. Translated from the Spanish by Geoff Hargreave

Grove. 224 pp. $22

Pity the great Cleopatra! Last of Egypt's pharaohs, the "enchanting queen" styled by Shakespeare as "cunning past men's thought" has in these latter days been reduced to a vague cinematic memory of Elizabeth Taylor in too much eye makeup and bad Theda Bara headgear. In her phantasmagoric new novel, Cleopatra Dismounts, the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa attempts to reclaim for modern readers the Ptolemaic ruler who claimed descent from Alexander the Great. (Cleopatra was not, in fact, Egyptian by blood, but Macedonian.)

Boullosa draws liberally from diverse classical sources -- Cicero, Sophocles, Theocritus, to name a few -- and takes her title from Virgil: "At a bound the queen slips from the saddle. All her company does the same. They glide to the ground, abandoning their mounts." But the heroine of Boullosa's antic work bears more resemblance to Xena, Warrior Princess, than she does to the woman maligned by many of her male contemporaries or to the clever stage vixen immortalized by Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw.

Boullosa backgrounds the dizzyingly complex politics of Rome in the first century C.E., keeping her focus on Cleopatra the lover and adventurer. She weaves three narrative strands, each dictated by the queen to her scribe, Diomedes.

The first, and least successful, tale is of Cleopatra's affair with Mark Antony, triumvir of Rome and, in Boullosa's account, the queen's greatest love. Mark Antony -- god manque, Dionysus to Cleopatra's Isis, "a successful general but an ineffectual king" -- has been abandoned by his troops and humiliated by his rival, Octavius (Caesar Augustus). Returning in disgrace to his lover, he misreads a letter from her and fears she has killed herself -- understandably, as the missive begins "I am dead, my king." In despair, Mark Antony stabs himself in the stomach, just moments before Cleopatra summons him to her mausoleum in the Temple of Isis. Diomedes then bears the general, bleeding to death, to join his queen.

What follows is Cleopatra's extended aria of grief and longing for her lover, though her grief has not blinded her to the disastrous consequences of their affair. Whatever the historical Mark Antony might have been like, in Boullosa's account he comes across as a colossal jerk: weak, capricious, prone to rages. Or, as Cleopatra puts it, "Antony, you were riddled with rottenness. As rotten as a woman who was once queen but today is forced to share a bed with the friends of her master. Rotten with the rottenness of a man who fails his city in time of war." Lest the reader not get the point, the queen's roster of rottenness goes on for an entire page, followed by her admission that "Only when love was satisfied, reciprocated, and rendered happy, could I feel complete." Cue Oprah.

Fortunately, in the second strand of the tale, the dying Cleopatra quickly moves on to recalling an earlier, happier self, the ambitious and canny 12-year-old who flees Rome with a band of cheerfully accommodating gladiators. The future queen journeys along the Appian Way in an ox-cart then boards a ship, which is soon overtaken by pirates. Dressed as Isis, the plucky princess charms and amazes the marauders, who bring her to their ruler, the governor of Tarsus. "I arrived at a court where there was not a single woman . . . composed of adventurers and desperadoes from all nations. . . . I should never have left that place."

Here Cleopatra's tale shifts for the third and last time, to an exhilarating and lubricious account of her sojourn among the Amazons. Up until this point, Boullosa's incantatory prose seems to struggle against the bonds of historical necessity; but in this final section she leaves behind more mundane matters and finds a subject worthy of her lyric style.

Cleopatra, now a young woman, is visiting the port of Pelisium when, like Europa before her, she is kidnapped by a divine bull. The supernatural beast carries her into the sea, invoking the Nereids as it does so; the sea-nymphs emerge, along with Neptune and numerous Tritons, all of whom proceed to act out some of the more adult-themed rites of the ancient world.

The bull then deposits her upon the shores of an eerie country where the sun hangs, unmoving, upon the horizon. In this sunset land Cleopatra is greeted by the Amazons, led by their queen, Hippolyta. She witnesses more arcane rituals, reminiscent of those detailed by Apuelius at the end of The Golden Ass and here rendered powerfully in Boullosa's hallucinatory prose, then at last ventures on to Alexandria, where she will have her fateful meeting with Caesar, after being smuggled into his chambers in a carpet.

Boullosa's epic, while uneven, is still wildly entertaining, as befits its subject -- one of history's "inimitable party-goers," as Boullosa styles her. Our last glimpse of the great queen is of a half-mad woman robed in her lover's blood, mourning a lost world that "beat to the rhythm of the souls of various gods who were something more than statues and paintings!" It's a tribute to Carmen Boullosa's gifts that she leaves her reader feeling that loss as well, and yearning for more of this talented author's work. *

Elizabeth Hand is the author of "Bibliomancy: Four Novellas," just published, and the forthcoming novel "Mortal Love."

For The Love Of the Dark

10/26/2003 Story Type:

A few years ago, I was walking home to where I used to live on Capitol Hill. It was late afternoon, a week before Halloween, one of those chilly golden days when cracked asphalt and broken bottles are hidden beneath oak leaves and horse chestnuts, and you can taste the air like Armagnac in the back of your mouth.

Suddenly a strange noise stopped me in my tracks. I looked around, saw no one, then turned and peered through a hedge to glimpse a very small boy, maybe 4 years old, standing all alone on top of a rock in a leaf-strewn yard. He was wearing a Dracula cape and fangs. As I watched, he lifted his arms, timidly, and began, in a very, very tentative voice to croon, "Booooo. . . . Booooo. . . . " I observed him at vampire practice for a while, long enough to note that as the shadows grew longer, and night descended, that shaky little voice grew louder and more confident, until he was shouting, "BOO!" at the top of his lungs.

I think of that little boy every year at this time. Part of it is recalling the intensity I felt as a child (and an adult) while in costume, the sheer exhilaration of being inside another's skin -- so this is what it's like to be Dracula! Catwoman! Marilyn Monroe! -- but also an accompanying terror: What if I can't get out of here? What if I can't get back to myself? There was also, though, something more primal -- the sense that night was falling, and maybe not night but Night, when something might say, "Boo!" back to me. And did I really want to be out there facing that alone?

Halloween is one of my two favorite holidays. Like Christmas, it has always been a season for me, and not a mere day. But not a season measured by sales of candy and decorations, Wal-Mart and Martha Stewart notwithstanding. For me and everyone else in the Northern Hemisphere, the Halloween season is signaled by the dying of the light. This is what spurred the ancient Irish to mark the day as Samhain, when the veil between our world and the other -- Faerie, the Land of the Dead -- grows thin enough that a mortal might pass through to the other side. Once there you could become trapped: A single night might pass, but when -- if -- you returned to our world, hundreds of years would have gone by; your home would have become unrecognizable, your loved ones would be dead, the face that met you in a mirror a skeletal vestige of your own. "Rip Van Winkle" is the most familiar American version of this tale, but its roots are deep and buried in the dark matter of myth.

The ancients believed this traffic between the worlds moved both ways, and not just at night. On Samhain, the entire day was fraught with danger. The dead walked, faerie women snatched human men as lovers; one could look through a hedge and see the past, toss nuts into a fire and in their burned husks read the future. Oh, and you could dress up and go door-to-door, begging for sweet soul-cakes to eat, though this, too, was asking for trouble. As Theodore, the Archbishop of Canterbury, warned some 1,300 years ago of another winter revel, "To those who go about at the Kalends of January garbed as a stag or an old woman, taking the form of beasts . . . three years penance, for the thing is devilish."

But Halloween isn't about Evil; it's about the Dark, about disguising ourselves and our most secret impulses so that, if we do succeed in momentarily passing through that veil to the Other Side, we won't be recognized or held accountable for what we do there. And I think that most of us do want to have a glimpse of what's down there in the dark; in spite of, or because of, our fears.

I've always loved costume parties: When I was 16, I talked my parents into letting me have a Black and White Ball, modeled after Truman Capote's notorious 1966 masquerade. My party was fabulous -- even if sitting around in the rec room in the dark listening to Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" probably wasn't how Tru and Diana Vreeland and Andy Warhol had spent their evening. But it wasn't the Halloween party of my dreams. The veil was still there; the wall between our world and the mysterious otherworld remained way too thick, though not thick enough to keep my mother from bursting in and turning the lights back on.

This is what today's schlock-and-goremeisters don't get: that down there in the basement, in the dark, there is a mystery, and not just hormonal teenagers and a puddle of fake blood. The English historian Ronald Hutton is a great debunker of Celtic mysteries -- ley lines, Wiccan ceremonies, Druidic sacrifices, the provenance of many so-called ancient rituals that in fact are only a few hundred years old. But Hutton is surprisingly sympathetic to the neopagans themselves, and to the impulse that drives their belief -- the impulse to lay claim to an ancient part of our psyche and acknowledge that, whether or not there is actually a veil between the worlds, it seems important for us to have a symbol of one. It's important to draw a line to separate the everyday from the mysterious, while still sanctioning our need to engage with the latter, whether by dressing up, rereading "The Monkey's Paw" for the hundredth time, or just staring into a candle flame until things start to move at the corners of our eyes.

The ancient Roman Lucretius said: "It is in autumn that the starlit dome of heaven throughout its breadth and the whole earth are most often rocked by thunderbolts, and again when the flowery season of spring is waxing. . . . These then are the year's crises." Crisis: literally, a turning point. Halloween is our annual crisis of fear. Late autumn is when the earth tilts toward the dark and, seasonal creatures that we are, we feel it shift beneath our feet. Whether or not we like it -- whether we're even aware of it while we're buying candy at the mall and worrying about our kids being out alone as night falls -- our world moves in a circle, and we're part of the cycle.

This is the time of year to remember that; to go outside, all by yourself as the shadows are falling, and very, very quietly practice saying, "Boo."

Elizabeth Hand is a novelist living on the coast of Maine whose favorite ghost story for Halloween is the classic 1911 tale "The Beckoning Fair One," by British Gothic writer Oliver Onions.

The Secret History; A mercurial, sometimes brutal novel of learning and levity.

10/12/2003

QUICKSILVER, Volume One of the Baroque Cycle

By Neal Stephenson. Morrow. 927 pp. $27.95

We have in our lap a Booke or Book, more particularly a Tome; viz., the first Volume of a Vast Undertaking that its author, Neal Stephenson, has named the Baroque Cycle. Said Author will be best-known for his earlier tales, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and most especially Cryptonomicon, which earned him readers earnest and many; though these same readers would be advised that the present work is not a Scientific Romance nor yet a Thriller but a Phant'sy, though one with deep roots in the History of Science.

A book of immense ambition, learning and scope, Quicksilver is often brilliant and occasionally astonishing in its evocation of a remarkable time and place -- Europe in the age of Newton, Pepys and Locke, to name just a few of the myriad characters who flock across its pages. But it is also the latest novel to succumb to the obesity epidemic that, of late, afflicts much of America's literature as well as its populace.

Stephenson, whose Cryptonomicon became a touchstone of the Internet era, has admitted great admiration for David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest; and Quicksilver, while spinning a tale around the origins of the Modern Age, exhibits many of the now-familiar tics of the post-post-modern novel: footnotes, playlets, doggerel, seemingly infinite lists. There is much beauty and insight in Stephenson's novel, but there are also more than 900 pages. To paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, a contemporary of Quicksilver's many protagonists, the book is often nasty, brutal and long.

It begins with one Enoch Root visiting the colony of Massachusetts in 1713, in search of a man named Daniel Waterhouse. Fans of Cryptonomicon will recognize both these names, though it's Waterhouse's descendants who people that book; Enoch himself is immortal, or at least extremely long-lived.

Daniel, in his sixties and a fellow of the Royal Society of London, is attempting to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts, but at Enoch's insistence he agrees to return to his native England. This first section of the book functions as a framing device -- most of Quicksilver takes place between 1661 and 1689 -- but it also gives us the first of innumerable cameo appearances by historical figures when Enoch encounters a very young Benjamin Franklin. These cameos sometimes give the novel the feel of an extremely extended and gross Classics Comic -- Samuel Pepys repeatedly pops up, showing everyone the kidney stone he keeps in his pocket -- but they also give the book much of its charm. They do not, alas, give it much in the way of momentum. Cryptonomicon was also a long book, but there Stephenson employed a propulsive narrative that is absent in his new novel.

Quicksilver's first section deals primarily with the younger Daniel Waterhouse and his circle. This includes Isaac Newton, Daniel's roommate at Trinity College; the mathematician Gottfried Leibniz; the cryptographer John Wilkins, founder of what became the Royal Society (and author of a proto SF work, The Discovery of a World in the Moone [1638]), whose Philosophical Language and Universal Character attempts to quantify all known information in stacks of cards; and, most memorably, the polymath anatomist Robert Hooke. These men form a veritable alembic of 17th-century intellectual life, indeed the crucible in which modern science, commerce and mathematics first took shape. Stephenson's intent appears to be to distill all of these things -- along with the development of the stock exchange, birth control, surgery, weaponry, modern politics and religion, and so on and so forth -- into the literary equivalent of the Alchemist's Stone, or at least a roaring good read.

Stephenson is not the first to use this rich material as the background for a novel. Peter Ackroyd, John Crowley, Iain Pears and Iain Sinclair, to name a few, have all been there before him. But the truly prodigious research that went into writing Quicksilver ultimately sinks it.

Every time the narrative starts to move -- and I mean page by page and sometimes even sentence by sentence -- Stephenson shackles it to a disquisition on coinage or sailing ships or the dizzyingly complex webs spun by rival political factions in 17th-century Europe. Some of this is fascinating -- lovely descriptions of Newton and his breakthroughs flash in and out of Quicksilver like the metal that gives the book its title -- but ultimately the narrative thread dissipates in a slurry of facts and those interminable lists. Stephenson also makes ample use of sly winks, nudges, kicks to and throttles of the reader, and employs far too many self-conscious anachronisms -- Venetian "Canal Rage" is only one of them.

Then Book One abruptly ends. Book Two is essentially a 300-page picaresque, presumably intended as a parody of same, with edifying information about commerce and manufacturing sprinkled here and there like pixie dust. The protagonists of this section are Jack Shaftoe the Vagabond King and his leman, the saucy, mathematically clever Eliza (who becomes a broker, natch). Shaftoe is another name that turns up in Cryptonomicon; his purpose here is mostly to provide comic relief and to suffer a few of the physical torments that Stephenson takes an undue pleasure in describing throughout the book. These include torture, surgery, vivisection, childbirth and, surprisingly, sex, which like much else in Quicksilver is reduced to its baser elements without ever becoming refined enough to stir the heart. But there are also remarkably funny, insightful discourses on 17th-century mores and fashion, which gave me hope that Stephenson might one day turn his talents to a secret history of women's couture: Manolo Blahnikonomicon.

Quicksilver's most intriguing elements remain the enigmatic Enoch Root, who carries a faint whiff of brimstone whenever he appears, and Leibniz's Arithmetickal Engine, described at one point as a "digital computer," which will "translate all human knowledge into a new philosophical language, consisting of numbers. To write it down in a vast Encyclopedia that will be a sort of machine, not only for finding old knowledge but for making new, by carrying out certain logical operations on those numbers -- and to employ all of this in a great project of bringing religious conflict to an end. . . . " Book Three attempts to dovetail the preceding storylines and characters, with mixed results. I read its final page with a combination of relief and great frustration because Quicksilver has wit, ambition and, despite its considerable longueurs, moments of real genius. Perhaps now that Stephenson has prepared the crowded stage of his monumental epic, the play proper can begin. *

Elizabeth Hand is the author of "Bibliomancy: Four Novellas," just published, and the forthcoming novel "Mortal Love."

The Word Made Flesh

06/01/2003

TESTAMENT

By Nino Ricci

Houghton Mifflin. 456 pp. $25

"Christ is God clothed with human nature," wrote the 18th-century Cambridge Platonist Benjamin Whichcote. In Testament, Nino Ricci's intriguing though uneven new book, all sense of Christ's twofold nature is stripped away, so that only Christ's human fabric remains to be woven into a tapestry of historical accounts of the man here known as Yeshua.

Materialist versions of the life of Christ are not new; Jim Crace's Quarantine and Paul Park's The Gospel of Corax are just two recent examples. The problem is that if most of us know how it all turns out, then how do we wrest something novel from The Greatest Story Ever Told, Over and Over and Over Again?

Ricci, author of the award-winning The Book of Saints, takes the "Rashomon" approach. In Testament, Yeshua's life is recounted by four narrators, three of them easily recognizable from Gospel accounts. Yihuda (Judas), is a member of an underground movement striving to overthrow the Romans. Miryam of Migdal (Mary Magdalene) is a very young, very plain girl drawn by Yeshua's matter-of-fact inclusion of women in his circle of followers. Yeshua's mother, also named Miryam, was raped by a Roman soldier when she was only 14, and has seen her entire life overshadowed by Yeshua's illegitimacy. Finally, there is Simon of Gergesa, a high-spirited Syrian shepherd who is Ricci's own creation and Testament's most compelling character.

Ricci's command of his historical material is first-rate. He shows the shifting allegiances and constant undercurrents of intrigue among the various political, ethnic and religious groups -- Jews, Samaritans, Pagans, Romans, Greeks -- who compose both Yeshua's followers and his enemies. Throughout, Testament's prose is marked by an elegant understatement, which gives dignity and restraint to Ricci's tale. But it also makes for slow going; the narrative voices, except for Simon's, sound remarkably alike and affectless. Yeshua, either despite or because of his sheer mundaneness, remains a rather soft-focus central character. As Miryam of Migdal describes him, he "talked to me in such a way as no man had ever spoken to me before, as if every subject was permitted; and though I could hardly recall afterward what it was that we had discussed, still it seemed to me that he had reached inside me with his words to touch the inmost part of me."

Only Yeshua's mother is gradually distinguished, by a simmering rage and despair that give her account a power and drive lacking in those of Yihuda and Miryam of Migdal. "There was something between us like a grief we had shared or a secret that had not quite been spoken, and I remembered how it had been with us when he was small, the weight I had felt settle over me in his presence. It was the weight of his own single-mindedness, it seemed to me now -- I did not know what he intended for himself, or what the Lord intended for him, except that he saw that thing always visible before him like a distant point he must reach." In her narrative, Yeshua is seen as a brilliant, precocious prodigal son who takes to the streets of Alexandria, where he is educated by itinerant scholars and becomes embroiled in the riots that erupt among the city's myriad religious factions.

Long before Yeshua reaches adulthood, he finds himself estranged from his mother and his half-siblings, thanks to his intellectual curiosity and angry hauteur. He becomes a wandering holy man, speaking to small groups of followers who, like young Miryam of Migdal, are attracted to his plain-spokenness and eagerness to engage with those who don't agree with him. Yeshua is also a gifted healer and unafraid to visit the leper colony at Arbela, where he is accompanied by Yihuda. An educated man and Yeshua's sole intellectual equal, Yihuda is viewed with suspicion by the fishermen, masons, farmers and women who accompany Yeshua on his travels. Through one of Testament's neater twists, we see how the gossip and mistrust rampant among Yeshua's own camp cause the innocent Yihuda to become the now-familiar betrayer Judas.

It's in the final strand of Ricci's narrative that Testament truly comes alive.That's when Simon, a young Syrian shepherd, takes over the tale, along with his traveling companion Jerubal. A thief and general mischief-maker, Jerubal accompanies Simon to Jerusalem to take part in the Passover festival. Their encounters with Yeshua and his entourage take on a sly, "Life of Brian"-style edge, as Jerubal unwittingly contributes to Yeshua's legend through a series of pranks and deceptions. But once they enter Jerusalem, the two young men become witnesses to Yeshua's last rites and ultimately participants in his arrest and execution.

Here Nino Ricci pulls off a genuine tour-de-force. Testament's last 50 pages are grisly, wrenching and utterly absorbing -- Yeshua's all-too-human suffering and death have a real and terrible power, unrelieved by lightning flashes of divinity or miraculous interventions. *

Elizabeth Hand is the author of the forthcoming "Bibliomancy: Four Novellas" and "Mortal Love," a novel.

A Beautiful Mind

02/02/2003

THE SPEED OF DARK

By Elizabeth Moon

Ballantine. 340 pp. $23.95

"Sometimes I wonder how normal normal people are," muses Lou Arrendale, the protagonist of Elizabeth Moon's splendid and graceful new novel, The Speed of Dark. Lou is not what most people would call "normal." He is autistic, and the heart of this ambitious, beautifully crafted book is his conflict over whether to engage in an experimental medical procedure that will make him normal -- i.e., like "most people," people like Lou's psychiatrist.

"When she . . . looks at me," Lou says, "her face has that look. I don't know what most people would call it, but I call it the I AM REAL look. It means she is real and she has answers and I am someone less, not completely real."

In Moon's very-near-future America, gene therapy has made it possible to cure neurological defects that cause the vast spectrum of autistic syndromes during infancy. Lou was born a few years too late for such a procedure, though early-intervention education and treatments have made it possible for him to live comfortably in mainstream society. Now in his late thirties, he has a job, an apartment, a car, friends who are, like himself, autistic, and friends who are not.

He works at a multinational pharmaceutical company, where he is one of a small number of autistic employees. His job is to scan a computer monitor, identifying patterns in the lines of symbols and numbers scrolling past so that the results can be used to develop new synthesized drugs.

Then Gene Crenshaw arrives as new division manager. Crenshaw's first order of business is to get rid of the autistic workers, whose specialized working conditions -- individual offices, their own enhanced gymnasium -- strike him as wasteful. He views their work with equal parts incomprehension and scorn. He threatens the autistic workers with dismissal unless they volunteer for a human-trials research protocol, a combination of drugs and nanotechnology that has been used successfully in animal trials but never on human subjects.

At first, Lou and his co-workers are angry, frightened and intimidated; fortunately, they have a sympathetic boss who immediately starts scrambling to obtain legal and medical assistance for them. But, of course, the volunteer trial is not just a threat: It's also a promise. If it's successful, Lou and his friends will finally have the opportunity for a normal life -- but what exactly would that mean?

Inevitably, The Speed of Dark has been compared to Daniel Keyes' classic and tragic Flowers for Algernon, in which a mentally disabled young man is medically enhanced to become a genius. The Speed of Dark may be an even greater book. True, Moon's plot deployment is rather clunky -- Crenshaw is such a model of rabid political incorrectness that it's hard to imagine him ever climbing the corporate ladder. But her novel isn't exactly intended to be a thriller; it is, rather, a subtle, eerily nuanced character portrait of a man who is both unforgettable and unlike anyone else in fiction.

Lou's obsessive attention to pattern details is what makes him brilliant at his work. His sensorium is so exquisitely attuned to them that, upon entering a room, he immediately notices the number of squares in a rug, their colors, the manner in which they are replicated. He sees, and hears, intricate patterns everywhere: in music, real and imagined; in cars lined up in a parking lot; in the fencing maneuvers his friends practice; in the stars overhead; and in the seemingly random movement of the pinwheel mobiles hanging in his office.

Yet he has difficulty following group conversations and identifying the emotions behind a sarcastic remark, or understanding what might impel a "normal" friend to harm him. As Lou begins to research the possible side effects of Crenshaw's experiment, as well as its moral and ethical dimensions, he also begins to weigh what he stands to lose -- the intense friendships he has made with a group of amateur fencers; his relationship with Marjory, a young woman he is in love with; his autistic friends, who may very well become unknowable to him after medical intervention; most of all, the self-knowledge and confidence that he posseses.

"I glance around my apartment and think of my own reactions, my need for regularity, my fascination with repeating phenomena, with series and patterns," he reflects. "Everyone needs some regularity; everyone enjoys series and patterns to some degree. I have known that for years, but now I understand it better. We autistics are on one end of an arc of human behavior and preference, but we are connected."

Moon, the parent of an autistic teenager, very quietly explodes all those stereotypes: The disorder can be heart-wrenching, frightening, isolating, challenging for people born with the syndrome and those close to them. Lou is an extremely high-functioning autistic, but he makes his way very carefully through a confusing world that, despite his career and that nice gym, makes few concessions to him or his co-workers. That it is "important not to scare people" is something he has learned through experience and observation; but even under close scrutiny, ordinary human interaction baffles him. Unsure whether Marjory likes him, Lou notes that normal people "know when someone likes someone and how much. They do not have to wonder. It is like their other mind reading, knowing when someone is joking and when someone is serious, knowing when a word is used correctly and when it is used in a joking way."

The end of The Speed of Dark is not unexpected, but it is marvelous all the same, and exceptionally moving in its balance of loss and wonder. "The edge is what I have," Theodore Roethke wrote in his most famous poem, "In a Dark Time"; what Lou Arrendale gradually realizes, what he ultimately gambles on, is that the edge is not all he has. It is a measure of Elizabeth Moon's genius that she enables a reader to thoroughly experience the world through Lou's tangled but exhilarating neurology, and wonder what we "normal" people are missing when we don't acknowledge our connection to those who seem so different from us. A lot of novels promise to change the way a reader sees the world; The Speed of Dark actually does. *

Elizabeth Hand is the author of the forthcoming "Bibliomancy: Four Novellas" and "Mortal Love," a novel.