Just might change the way you look at the world... (Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy)

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Product:	Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy
Date:	05.01.06 (677 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Compelling, well-crafted and involving story which presents some intriguing ideas

Disadvantages: Some may find it heavy-handed in places

I read this novel when I was about 18 – a few years ago now, let’s not get too specific – and couldn’t remember too much about it except that it made quite an impression on me. Oh, and that my battered copy had, frustratingly, several pages missing at a crucial point! So when I recently came across an intact copy, it seemed like a good time to rediscover whatever it was that made such an impression on me in... whatever year it was.

This, Marge Piercy’s third novel, was first published in 1978 (no, that’s not when I read it). Piercy, an American author and poet now in her late sixties, is a versatile writer who has worked in a variety of genres – this, as may be surmised from the title, can probably best be classified as science-fiction.

Woman on the Edge of Time is the story of Connie Ramos – thirty-seven years old, Mexican-American and living on welfare – a woman on the margins of society. Destructively labelled with words that don’t describe her – mentally ill, child abuser – Connie has experienced being detained in a psychiatric hospital and has had her loved daughter removed from her care. The harrowing opening chapter sees Connie again hospitalised against her will after she allegedly assaulted a man – actually while trying to defend her niece. Beaten up, heavily medicated and with nobody to speak on her behalf, no-one wants to listen to Connie’s side of the story. Life can’t get much worse.

Well, actually it can, because lucky Connie is one of the patients chosen to participate in a frightening experiment involving electronic implantations in the brain – an experiment in which five thousand monkeys have already been “used up”.

Initially unknown to her, though, Connie is also a “catcher” – an unusually telepathically receptive individual able to tune in to a future world: a post-revolutionary Utopian community in the year 2137 where men and women live in harmony with nature and each other, an androgynous, playful society where all are valued equally regardless of age, sex or race. The action of the story moves between present and future, providing a stark contrast between the world in which Connie has to live - the casual cruelties of the hospital, the inhumanity and contempt of the experimenters who regard psychiatric patients as barely human, disposable experimental fodder - and the far more attractive – though imperilled – community of the future. Through her contact with the village of Mattapoisett, Connie witnesses a world in which technology is used to free and nurture humanity, in which traditional gender roles are obsolete and individuals come together in family groupings based on choice rather than blood. However this society too is threatened and Connie also witnesses a bleak alternative future.

Piercy’s imagined Utopia is a fully realised and attractive concept, although she does not fall into the trap of making her imagined Utopia too perfect to be true – human frailties and weaknesses still exist in the future world, and require to be addressed by its inhabitants. Like Connie herself, I wasn’t sure about everything – particularly how reproduction is dealt with and the virtual elimination of the blood tie – but Connie’s new friends explain and justify the decisions their civilisation has made.

The central character of Connie is someone we can easily care for and identify with – despite her hard life, the loss of her loved ones and her appalling present circumstances, she is someone who does not accept her fate but continually struggles against it, dreaming of a better life. Her glimpses of an alternative future heighten her determination to fight against her own powerlessness and reclaim some choices.

The book is an excellent and intriguing read, if deeply depressing at times. I don’t know if psychiatric hospitals in 1970s USA were really the horrific places Piercy describes and whether the type of research carried out in the book would really be permitted – one would prefer to think some of her scenes exaggerated, although she states in her acknowledgements that she spoke to many past and present patients, and thanks the people who “risked their jobs to sneak me into places I wanted to enter”.

By contrast, the future community of Mattapoisett is described in a way to enthral and delight the reader. While not all questions can be answered, Piercy provides us with rich detail about the workings of her future society and provokes the reader to ponder on some fundamental issues about human beings and how we live together. The novel also raises some intriguing questions about the nature of sanity and reality, leaving us to contemplate these…….

Despite having been written some thirty years ago, the novel does not seem particularly dated. Whatever you may ultimately feel about Marge Piercy’s idea of Utopia, the book is highly recommended as an intriguing and thought-provoking read.

Published by the Women’s Press, 381pp. Cover price £6.99 – available from Amazon Marketplace sellers from £4.07.

Summary: A classic in the science-fiction of ideas