A review by ratgirlreads
Enchantment: A Classic Fantasy with a Modern Twist by Orson Scott Card

3.0

 Orson Scott Card’s novel Enchantment is a fascinating ancient fairy tale, told with all the minute detail and character development of a modern novel, enmeshed into the setting of first Soviet Russia and then America of the early 1990s.  As with much of his writing, it is the moral dilemmas and introspection of the characters that set Card’s books apart from much of the other speculative fiction published today.  

            Some aspects of the morality ascribed to the characters, and particularly the main character Ivan, are difficult to explain upon close examination.  Ivan spends his childhood in the Soviet Union, raised by parents who do not seem to miss the option to have a religious affiliation.  When they decide to draw on his mother’s Jewish heritage to believably convert to Judaism, it is clearly not because of any religious beliefs, but because it is a practical means to get visas to leave the USSR.  Although they seem to maintain connections to the Jewish community once they are safely in the US, no mention of actual religious practice is made.  And yet, Ivan firmly holds Judeo-Christian beliefs about marriage, which he unwaveringly applies both in his refusal to sleep with his fiancée Ruth (which surprises even his parents, suggesting that they had inculcated no such beliefs in him) and in his politically convenient marriage to Katerina, even though the nature of that marriage does not dovetail with the kind of marriage Ivan expected to make.  His belief causes him much agonizing over how to act rightly, especially with Katerina, as their relationship develops, which enriches the story while giving the reader a high opinion of the moral rectitude of the main character.  This closer examination, however, suggests that Card is trying to portray Ivan’s beliefs, coming from no clear cultural source, as natural to all humans.  

            Another belief seems even less explicable—upon arriving in Taina, a society in which literacy is rare and not highly valued, and in which men are judged solely by their strength and skill with axe and sword, Ivan, a Ph.D student and decathlete, almost immediately begins to judge himself by Taina’s standards.  This may simply be an indication that Ivan struggles with low self-esteem—Katerina, to whom he feels drawn, is dismissive of him for failing to meet Taina’s standards, and he is constantly surrounded by people whose lives are unquestioningly based on them.  However, before coming to Taina, he did not seem particularly lacking in self-esteem—he was his father’s “most apt pupil” and had published papers in respected journals.  He was a talented, college-level athlete, and he seems proud of all these accomplishments.  Once in Taina, however, he seems to rate his exceptional skill with languages and his long-distance running as nothing as soon as he sees men in armor waving swords also rating it as nothing.  With all his understanding of the differences 1,100 makes in a culture, he still criticizes his past life as cowardly, asking his father upon his return journey to his own time why he was never trained to use a sword growing up in the 1970s, even though it was the very skills he was trained in that enabled him to rescue and communicate with Katerina.  When Ivan gives himself up to training as a swordsman, even knowing that the time required to develop the skill is so great as to bar him from usefulness for many years, it contributes to a tone suggestive that war is somehow an essential part of human culture in which all men must participate to be worthwhile.  

            Ivan seems to take a more confident, practical, and less dim view of things when making the choice between nudity and protection from the elements.  However, it is impossible not to call to mind Card’s well-known views on homosexuality, highlighted by the response to his Superman stories, when reading of the universal repulsion and religious taboo the people of Taina feel about him wrapping himself up in a garment sewn to be worn differently by a woman, for the purpose of avoiding skin lacerations walking through the forest.  Though Ivan champions a more practical view of the event, he utterly fails to persuade anyone else that blood loss is not preferable to wearing clothing intended for the other sex.  He even acknowledges that the practice would be “strange” in other circumstances, even in his own culture.  While any reader must wholeheartedly sympathize with the shivering Ivan as he struggles to follow Katerina in the nude, the very extremity of the situation seems intended to highlight the unnaturalness of wearing clothing culturally proscribed for the opposite gender Card could be supposed to feel.  

            Nevertheless, the complexity of the story and the inclusion of extant gods aside from the Christian one suggest that the book is more than just a showcase of the Mormon Card’s own beliefs.  The story is rich and compelling, and entirely satisfying with or without an examination of the morality behind the characters’ development.  The book is certainly a worthwhile read a worthy addition to the fairy tale genre.