15 February 2005

REVIEW: The Child Goddess, by Louise Marley
Reviewed by Jane Acheson

Jane Acheson is an editor of English books and a former librarian. She has studied almost anything with an "ology" in it, but earned an official undergraduate degree in comparative literature from Smith College. She writes fiction and essays on a wide variety of topics, and fulminates about baseball. This is her first published review.

There is a gentle, assured hand at the wheel of The Child Goddess, a hand that posits an order of female priests under the aegis (and recently-legitimated Gospel) of Mary Magdalene. This authorial hand, that of Louise Marley, will present ethical dilemmas and medical mysteries over the course of the novel, but its strength lies in the reverberating emotions of its protagonists, in their daily routines and connections among each other. Priest, doctor, researcher, concerned citizen, archivist—all swirl around a girl, a child from a tribe lost long ago.

Mother Isabel Burke shaves her head as a sign of her devotion (the cover image is a ringer for that exotic woman in the first Star Trek movie), and carries her compassionate curiosity out into situations of poverty and exploitation, acting as both anthropologist and advocate in sticky multicultural situations. When she contracts with the huge ExtraSolar Corp, which seems to run just about every aspect of off-world colonization, something is bound to go wrong.

Isabel is brought in to decipher the enigma of a strange little girl, captured on a planet thought uninhabited. But Oa isn't just a traumatized victim of colonialism, she represents an oddity of nature, and a holy grail of future science: she does not age, and may never grow old. At a vehicle for profit, a repository of biological wonder, a signifier for a whole ship of missing colonists, and embarrassing evidence of ExtraSolar's offworld mistakes, Oa is also a scared kid trapped in captivity. How can Isabel not warm to this troubled soul? How can she not prevail on every authority she knows to rescue the child?

In fact, a host of good Samaritans step in to support Isabel, and to combat the unthinking bureaucrats. These apparatchiks of evil baffling in their unexamined villainy, flimsy in both emotion and logic, and as the novel went on their presence came to feel cartoonish, unnecessary, a false note in a novel about emotions. Many of the plotted elements also rang vaguely false, or paled in comparison with the psychological effect of Oa's secret history, her bonding with Isabel, and their mutual mystical journey. For that I am sorry, since Marley brings together a series of striking portraits and moments, which deserve a better narrative to hold them together.

The emotional set-pieces are quite effective: Isabel holds Mass for a tiny, devoted congregation outside Seattle; Oa defends her sense of self in the alien environment; Jin-Li Chung, a secondary character from Marley's earlier The Terrorists of Irustan provides entertaining skepticism and sudden, unthinking loyalty; the implacable administrator, Gretchen Boreson, lets her roiling desperation show through the smooth mask of her face-lifted efficiency. All the adults pivot around the central symbol of a child who cannot grow, and themselves gain strength and insight, or find themselves trapped in their own immaturities.

Ultimately, Goddess is a story of confirmation and affirmation. Ethical dilemmas collapse in the face of new evidence; ambiguous feelings turn clear; troubling questions disappear as silently as the elusive tribespeople on their islands. As a treatise of interstellar anthropology, the novel is a failure. But as the characters struggle to find and to grow from one world and context to the next, the novel succeeds despite its weaknesses.