Godbond by Nancy Springer
I did not read Godbond in good faith.
If its predecessors had been morally repugnant like Jalav or Taurus Four, I wouldn't feel bad about that. Alas, they weren't. They were just so extra: nothing but flaring jealousy, lovers running away in the middle of the night, husky declarations of love, and so many tears. It was exhausting and then dull.
There were things I liked, naturally. The small and atrophying world intrigued me, and there were questions to which I wouldn't have minded answers. But those weren't the reasons I kept reading.
It's damn clear at the end of Mindbond how critical it is that Kor, Dan, and Tass come together. On top of this, we have endless innuendo between Dan and Kor, and the love triangle between them and Tass.
I'm generally not one to make crass jokes, but I half expected a threesome and you can't just quit reading a series where you suspect a three-way will save the world.
Godbond is much like Madbond and Mindbond, with one significant difference: Dan and Kor spend most of the novel apart. Dan seeks the world's savior while Kor must protect his tribe from raids. As we're limited to Mahela (the villain) or Dan's point of view, this means we hardly see or hear from Kor. I expected this to be an improvement—maybe Dan could stop with the constant promises of eternal love. Instead, he spends much of this time thinking and feeling about Kor. Mainly, he longs for Kor and curses himself for leaving his bondbrother behind when he doesn't have a clue where to look for this supposed savior.
Tass is a little more present than in previous books, but she's still Tass: conveniently present when the plot needs a helping hand and just as conveniently absent when the plot calls for added tension.
I'll get to spoilers here in a minute, but I want to wrap things up for those coming from the Mindbond curious if they should dabble with Godbond.
I think people who genuinely care about the characters will appreciate Godbond no matter what. Dan, Kor, and Tass remain consistent, so if you loved them in the past, you'll love them here. That said, the plot lags, multiple big questions are answered via info-dumps, other questions aren't answered at all, and the conclusion is somehow convenient, heavy-handed, and vague. So if you're coming at Godbond from the opposite angle—sick of the characters but curious about the plot—I don't see how you could close Godbond happy.
SPOILERS AHEAD
There is nothing extraordinary Dan, Kor, and Tass (DKT) must do to unlock their combined power. They must merely hold hands—with their magical scars touching—name their true names, and give in to their oneness.
The only part of this equation that DKT lacked at the end of Mindbond was their true names. Luckily, Dan figures his out not a third of the way into Godbond, long before he understands why it's important, and Kor's birth name is his true name. Dan and Kor are also quite (too?) comfortable with each other and their oneness. If it were up to the two of them, they'd have stumbled across their salvation without any of Godbond's random questing.
Godbond is about Tass.
Scared of love, afraid of emotion, terrified of sharing any part of herself, she is the missing link. She must both figure out who she truly is and be comfortable baring that to the two men she loves and fears the most. Godbond gives her the time and space to do so.
This is a problem. As established, we never get Tass's POV. So we watch Dan watch Tass struggle with letting her guard down.
“Oh no, Tass is startled again and has disappeared. I guess it's time for Dan to meander in some new direction, mentally flagellating himself for abandoning Kor and half-heartedly seeking a lost savior while he waits for Tass to find him again.”
If Tass's mental/emotional transformation is the crux of the story—and it is—we need to see that first hand. In part, yes, because it's boring seeing it second hand, but mostly because the weight of the plot is compromised when we don't understand why a happy conclusion is in jeopardy.
It's also a problem because Tass is one of the great mysteries of the book. With a practically dead world and only Dan’s POV to go by, the only means of teasing apart the mystery of Tass is in straight exposition.
Her origin is blown wide open close to the opening of Godbond when Mahela refers to her as “daughter.” Over a hundred pages later, she bares her soul—and her history—to Dan.
Wolves raised her; thus, she can shape-shift into a wolf. She doesn't know her parents, her tribe, nothing, and is only 'civilized' thanks to the herding tribe taking her under their wing. For much of her life she had weird, fated dreams about Dan. She's extra afraid of Dan, even though she loves him, because his damn-near identical brother tried to rape her. The end.
Plenty anti-climactic, especially when we already know that she’s Mahela’s daughter.
Alright, so coming into the conclusion the plot is stacked thusly: Mahela is trying to steal everything of beauty from the world and spirit it back to her underwater lair. The world is so desolate now that it seems most people will end up starving to death. War is raging among the few remaining sentient creatures, with Kor seemingly being the prime target. Kor and Dan know their true names and are more-or-less comfortable with everything needed to activate DKT power. Tass is absent (as always) though this time not on her own accord; she was too injured to ride and needed time to gain her strength. At the last second she appears, riding a stag, and they bond.
Within us, the three, was a calm. And in the calm, a nameless, peaceful passion I can scarcely describe—we were Kor, Tass, Dan, but we were one, we were all handbond, all mindspeak, mindbond, the thoughts of any one of use belonging to all, the feelings ... shared by all three. We were specks swimming together in the sea of ourselves, we were as vast as the sea, and nearly as strong: in that stillness and that passion there was great power. Immense as the sea. But it was not the power that filled our hearts, it was—Kor, Tass, Dan. It was love.
With the power of their love, they smite the malaise encircling the earth, banish whatever nefarious shit Mahela’s got going on dry land, and it looks like they’ve smashed it. Game over.
Mahela’s not going down, though. If she can’t steal the world, she’ll destroy it entirely. She raises a wall of water and sends it rushing towards land. Not even DKT can stop it!
Kor breaks from the group and petitions to Mahela: his life for the world’s survival.
Mahela accepts and even offers a bonus: she'll undo the wound in the final battle that cost Kor a very particular part of his anatomy.
(Aside: this isn't the first Nancy Springer story I've read where a man loses that part of his anatomy.)
Now we get the next bit of straight-exposition to fill in story gaps. Mahela admits she is Tass and Sakeema's mother, meaning she isn't the god of death like DKT thought; she's the All-Mother. For reasons, she got annoyed at human greed and that’s what prompted her to steal everything from the world? And if she can’t steal it, she’s content to destroy it. Except she really likes Kor, so she’ll let everything ride in exchange for dibs.
Kor is nothing but a damn martyr the whole series, but here he's not martyring himself because all of a sudden, Kor loves Mahela. The villain of three novels who tried to kill him repeatedly, raped him, and sought to either undo or destroy the world. He loves her with a brilliance that rivals Dan’s love of Tass.
(Ignore the fact that neither of those loves rival Dan and Kor’s love. Not even close.)
Dan is sad, and cries and cries and cries, and makes some animals the way Sakeema supposedly made animals and cries some more. But he loves Tass and the world is safe and at least Kor wants to be mostly-or-completely-dead under the water with a horrible, horrible woman, so he turns his attention to Tass.
This conclusion of Godbond is too much. DKT are too powerful until they are completely helpless. Mahela is perfectly villainous and evil until Kor decides to subject himself to her. The tone is completely helpless and hopeful, absolutely bleak yet beautiful. It felt like an ending written to try to appeal to everyone, and in doing so it stretched itself so thin it lacks soul.
Oh, and if you were curious about Sakeema ... too bad. You get a little more information about Valan and Challert, or whatever ghostbros were called, but the only real wrap-up you get on Sakeema is that he was, in fact a real corporeal being, born of Mahela, and DKT combined are somehow Sakeema and/or Sakeema-like even though obviously they cannot be Sakeema because he was a literal person.
Cover art by Kevin Eugene Johnson:
