I have a generally favourable opinion of books that get included in the the New York Times top 100 of the year, and there’s never been a better time to read a dystopian novel that shares shattering similarities to the present but sheesh this one was a thump lump No.
Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan is set sometime in the near future when earth has run out of resources or climate change has destroyed those resources or some combination, and what remains of humanity has taken to a space-pod where reproduction has failed and is living itself out in barbie-style bodies with ill defined purpose and organization. What is mostly clear is that scarification is some kind of marker of wealth and prestige, and so people walk around with layered grafts of scars that this reader found unsettling to contemplate.
Our protagonist, Christine, is some kind of skin grafting genius capable of writing full narratives in scars, and in some, again ill defined, way is supposed to be resisting the powers in charge of the space-pod, with the uninspired name Jean de Men, by writing the story of a powerful eco-activist, Joan (aka: Joan of Arc) onto her body.
It’s never clear how this writing is supposed to change anything, but then, isn’t that the promise of all art – that it will make some measurable change in an immeasurable way, shift culture or politics through the radicalness of its writing (or music, or art, or dance, or or or). Which, let’s be clear, I do believe art has this capacity, my problem in the Book of Joan is that the aims are so buried in science fiction uncertainty (like where are we in space, and time, and politics) or maybe more precisely that the world building is so opaque that the reader barely cares to find out if art will succeed in changing anything because the stakes of the change are so difficult to place.
Please do find yourself some comforting dystopian book that will make our current circumstances more reasonable (I cannot imagine what such a book might be), but let it not be this one.
Literary Vice 