A review by paracyclops
The Judas Rose by Suzette Haden Elgin

challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

The Judas rose is the sequel to Suzette Haden Elgin's epochal Native tongue. It continues the story of a group of women in a future misogynist dystopia, who construct a language in which to express their own reality and experience, as an act of resistance. The women in question are members of linguist families, which earn their money and considerable influence from a monopoly on translation services—translation is big business because the Earth (divvied up between the Christian fundamentalist USA and the USSR) has become an effective client state of a consortium of advanced alien species, whose technology supports its economy and interstellar expansion.

In this book we see the women's language Láadan (which is a fully developed conlang published by Elgin in tandem with the first book) spreading by subterfuge, disguised as a harmless and charming female hobby. Male linguists patronise their women, thinking of the language as a silly diversion, but their women aim to remake and overthrow the patriarchy by linguistic means. In effect, Elgin was setting out to explore the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a largely discredited linguistic theory which suggests that the form of a language is a determining influence on cultural values. Leaving aside the technical malarky, it makes a great speculative trigger for a SF novel, and offers a platform for the exploration of feminist ideas that are very much still live.

Native tongue was published a year before Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's tale, but it's a very different kind of novel, and so is The Judas rose. It is a far less terrifying book, in which the violence of the patriarchy is largely hidden away behind long-established social conventions. It is also written in a much more traditional style, keeping the reader at a certain distance from its broad cast of characters, and deploying a subtle, knowing satirical sense to expose the ridiculousness of patriarchal beliefs. I actually found it very funny—it's not full of belly laughs, but it is full of convincingly portrayed men (both smart and dumb) with enormous self-knowledge deficits. As a whole project, the Native tongue series was groundbreaking, but as an individual novel The Judas rose was basically just a fun read for me.