The Revenants

Rating:
Summary: One of my favorite Tepper novels
Review: Out of all of Sheri S. Tepper's books that I've read, this and _The Gate to Women's Country_ remain my favorites. While the writing in _The Revenants_ may not be as confident nor as polished as in her later works (e.g. _The Gate to Women's Country_, _Grass_, _Sideshow_, _A Plague of Angels_, _Six Moon Dance_, etc.) I find it friendlier, less bitter, and warmer. I *liked* most of the characters in this book. I enjoyed hearing them talk, watching their struggles, and empathized with their pain. In some of Tepper's other books, I found the characters boring or annoying.

The world of _The Revenants_ hurtles towards the ultimate in Separation: myth from reality, race from race, nation from nation, village from village, everyone forced into vanishingly smaller pigeonholes, until they are altogether Separated into extinction. Black-robed Keepers speed the process by exacting a harvest of young men and women.

A few individuals struggle to remain free. Jaer is at the heart of this struggle: Jaer embraces male and female, myth and reality, and by the end, all of humanity, the living opposite of Separation. Jaer is on a Quest, and so are Jaer's companions. Tepper gives us an interesting "behind the scenes" look at Quests, fairy tales, and prophecies.

Jaer's Quest is a garbled mish-mash partially made up in jest by the two old men who were Jaer's foster parents. They die before explaining it to Jaer. Prince Medlo's Quest is a politically motivated, veiled assassination attempt. Jasmine's Quest was also engineered to get her out of the way. Thewson's Quest is fueled by a young man's ambition to be King. Leona's Quest is a mission to save the life of an ailing friend. All the quests are rendered meaningless by Separation and the murderous, destructive Keepers; yet they are also fulfilled, though the nature of the Quest changes as the protagonists become wiser and more knowledgable.

It's all a fairy tale, as one of the characters observes, but fairy tales do not reach happy endings on their own, as this book shows us. Someone has to make them work. The prophecies were made to come true --- doesn't that impy some sort of time travel? The characters must answer this question in the end.

As usual, Tepper throws in more ideas than she has time to fully develop, but this time, I didn't mind. The book worked as a whole, and the hinted-at ideas gave me the sense of a big, wide world with a real past. This book foreshadows some of the ideas Tepper works with in _Beauty_ and _A Plague of Angels_ (for example, being set in the far future after much of humankind has left the earth for the stars), but I liked _The Revenants_ better.

Like many books in the fantasy genre, there is an Evil with an Army of Darkness threatening to take over the world, but in this case the Evil is unusual, and we pity the Army of Darkness after we see who they are, and how they suffer. I liked the twisted way the Keepers fit their philosophy of Separation: faceless, sexless, and blind to the mythical.

All that, and there's even a sweet little love story in there, too. I love this book. Too bad it's out of print, but I'm not selling my copy. :-)