Elisabeth Vonarburg's "The Silent City" (The Silent City - Eliza Vonarburg)

Member Name: jbsabbath

Product:	The Silent City - Eliza Vonarburg
Date:	28/08/09 (38 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interesting, well written and unusual character relationships

Disadvantages: Too much thinking from the main character

"The Silent City" is Elisabeth Vonarburg's first novel, originally published in 1980 in French, translated into English by Jane Brierley.

Set in the far future after the surface of the world has been decimated by a nuclear holocaust, the sum of man's knowledge and technical advances has been saved in the City, an underground self-supporting environment.

Few real people now survive there, kept alive for extended lifetimes by machines, conducting experiments and research on the medieval-like tribes that now roam the surface above.

Paul is one such person, trying in earnest to breed a new race of humans that can (hopefully) live indefinitely and are able to heal themselves extraordinarily quickly, and into this ghostly world Elisa is born, cloned from the City's vaults.

Raised by Paul as a daughter and then taken as his lover, Elisa helps to continue the research into the future of the human race, but she soon realises that not everything is as it seems in the City - soon she will have to make the decision to leave and go to the surface, where a battle for supremacy is about to begin.

I had never heard of this novel prior to picking it up, but the blurb on the back of the book was enough to make me interested - seeing as it had come from 'The Women's Press' it was bound to have a different slant on the usual post-apocalypse genre.

"The Silent City" is a very daring book in its character relations, asking questions about sexual desire and identity you would never have bothered considering yourself, especially when characters discover they can change themselves into either a man or a woman - Freud and Oedipus are in there too, as you might have guessed.

I think I'm right in saying that this could only ever have been written by a woman - there's no way a male writer would have had the mind to sit down and write something so driven by weird sexual feelings and deranged motherhood!

But then, the scope of the sci-fi required is there, as is the technical mumbo-jumbo (but thankfully not lots of it), so the bleak world of the City and the ravaged surface comes to life with a brilliant clarity.

The characters are for the most part well constructed, if sometimes not so well-rounded to seem wholly realistic (yet serviceable), and the situations Elisa finds herself in are quite convincing.

With the ability to change into a man and having had an affair with her 'father', Elisa is suitably insecure throughout the novel - and here comes my main gripe with "The Silent City": there is far too much *thinking*.

Every time a twist in the story pops up, we're treated to Elisa having a big thinking session where she talks to herself a lot and runs through every conceivable possibility and never really coming to any sort of decision - Vonarburg stops us from drawing our own conclusions and sadly the main character's thought processes do become quite annoying after a while.

However, what makes up for it is "The Silent City"'s excellent first part, which tells us all about the City and we see the growing up of Elisa.

From then on, when the story moves to the surface, the story becomes a little wandering and uninteresting, but by the end I was fully engaged, enjoying the outside politics and sex war between the empowered men and enslaved women.

Of course, these are all quite stereotypical feminist topics, and I'm sure "The Silent City" will appeal to lovers of Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale", but it does make for an interesting read, ambitious in scope and with plenty of twists and turns to boot.

Ultimately, "The Silent City" is a strong sci-fi novel and an entertaining read, and I'll be checking out whatever else Vonarburg has to offer.

[The book can be purchased from PlayTrade on play.com for £5.00 (including postage and packing), at time of writing]

Summary: Bleak yet rich vision of the future after a nuclear holocaust