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wazbar's review
challenging
dark
tense
slow-paced
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.0
This book tries to hold up a mirror to the hatreds and bigotries of midcentury America, but misses the mark. Its horror and misery (and boy, is there a lot of horror and misery) comes off as contrived and fantastical rather than grounded.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Slavery, Misogyny, Cannibalism, Racial slurs, and Rape
It's horrific in a way that makes you think it must be serving some didactic point, but I could not tell you what that point is.el_entrenador_loco's review
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
agigeroff's review
adventurous
dark
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
christytidwell's review
3.0
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.
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.
giddypony's review
5.0
This book becomes more intense as it goes along, and some of the most profound statements are toward the end in the relationship (not romantic) of two of the characters. Charnas says she originally wrote it as a political satire, and bits of that are in evidence, in an entirely organic and plausible way. There was one character I didn't feel that I really understood - but not in a way that took away from the larger ideas. I am surprised this book isn't more know - if you are interested in patriarchy, dystopian novels where the disaster seems all too real and immanent you will be interested in this. Additionally I felt that she gives an view into the mindset of slave holders, and the slave, or any very gender divided society (including I am sure some of the ultra rightwing in the US.)
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