15 October 2002

RETRO-REVIEW: Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey
Tor, 1997
Reviewed by Susan Harris

Susan Harris lives deep in the frozen midwest with her partner and their two cats.

When you first start reading Black Wine, there are a lot of things you don't know. You don't know where you are. You don't know whether you're in the past, the present, or the future. You don't know where the protagonist comes from, why she's a slave, why there's an old woman being kept in a cage in the same complex. You don't know why the protagonist is fascinated by her. There is one thing that you do know, however, and that is that no matter how hard you work or how good you get, you will never be able to write like this.

Welcome to the world of Black Wine, Candas Jane Dorsey's first novel. Among the snippets of critical praise that decorate its book jacket is a quote from Fantasy & Science Fiction arguing that Dorsey "deserves to be much more widely read;" and perhaps now that her second novel, A Paradigm of Earth, has been nominated for a Spectrum Award, she will be. When that happens, I hope people will rediscover Black Wine, a one-of-a-kind novel that redefines the rules of storytelling.

What rules? Well, let's talk about clarity. Dorsey's prose style is beautifully clear; both expressive and spare, economical but still rich, clean without being antiseptic. It is precisely because the writing produces such a powerful illusion of clarity that we are irresistibly drawn into a story that is deeply, darkly, and intentionally confusing. Or let's talk about exposition, something that we all know is one of the necessary evils of the genre — and which, nevertheless, Dorsey manages to persuade us to do without.

Everything about this world is vividly realized; much of it is never explained. We are instead forced to occupy the position of the amnesiac slave girl we meet in the opening chapter, who, as far as she is concerned, has no backstory, and can understand the universe only through her immediate experience of it. Gradually, we discover histories hidden from the protagonist — the story of Essa who is searching for her mother and a journal documenting an unnamed woman's struggle to escape from the sadistic ruling class she was born to. By the end, we can find our way around the family ties and the interlinked histories, just as we can find our way around the Remarkable Mountains, the Fjord of Tears, the Black Isles, and the dunes at Avanue. At the same time, we're still not sure whether they're located on a distant planet, in a fantasy world, or on Earth in some future so remote that all of our familiar landmarks have disappeared. And the beauty of it is, we don't care, in part, because this strange, new, and richly imagined universe is also terribly familiar.

More than anything else, this is a book about power — how it reshapes space, language, memory, and sexuality, what it does to people and places, whether there is any escape from it. Most of the characters who are caught in its web are female, and women reading the book will recognize similar methods of domination, just as we recognize what these characters go through as they struggle to separate sexuality from coercion, to recover or reinvent identities, memories, and languages that have been denied and destroyed.

Although this story is an allegory, it is not a simple one; and power is not always patriarchal. In the "zone of control," which is a literal place as well as a state of being, power is passed down through the women of the ruling dynasty. The most terrifying incarnation of ruthless, amoral, unlimited power is the dead queen whose ghost is still tormenting this universe. Unblinking and brutal in its depiction of power's intense effects — on those who wield it and on those who are oppressed by it — Black Wine also shows us a number of creative, vibrant, and appealing alternatives to life in the zone of control. However, the novel is also honest about the difficulty of ever really solving the problem of power.

Black Wine is both a multilayered, compelling, mind-expanding story and a stunning demonstration of the power of language. It does, indeed, deserve to be much more widely read, especially now. Timeless as Black Wine is, it seems disturbingly relevant to the present moment, as phrases like "homeland security" are beginning to feature more prominently on the news, and the zone of control tightens around all of us.