The Shore of Women by Pamela Sargeant

The Shore of Women came recommended to me. I enjoyed Watchstar, so I was excited to jump into a meatier Pamela Sargeant book. I was sure that with 200 more pages, she'd avoid some of what I considered to be the pitfalls of the otherwise brilliant Watchstar.

Alas, this was not to be. I am absolutely utterly loathe to dunk on a book beloved by a friend, but I'm afraid that's what I'm about to do. So if this book is sacred to you, please turn back now.

(I'm serious, friend. I don't think I'm mean, but I also don't pull any punches.)

I've also struggled with writing this review; I humbly request your indulgence if it's not up to my standards. I've reached the point where I simply need to move on.

Quick background: women live in technologically advanced cities, though their lives are mundane. Change scares them. They're hella gay.

Men live as barbarians outside the City, where strife defines their short lives. They have no idea women, like, exist as mere mortals. They're hella gay.

Why the strict delineation? We have women to thank for that. Living on the other side of the apocalypse, they blame men for the armageddon that befell the earth. The best way to prevent that from happening again is to prevent men from having any power. Thus, they have expelled their male offspring for centuries.

Just keeping men out in the cold isn't enough, though. They must be physically and mentally powerless. To this end, women created a fictional deity—The Lady—and have tricked men into worshipping her. Women use this piety to control men via the super-future's Zoom equivalent.

As the women know that cooperation is the only true path to knowledge and power, they want men to be barbarians. Should men start to band together, the women are happy to make an example out of them. They then look upon men with disgust for being barbarians.

It's, sadly, very realistic.

Initially, we follow an idealistic dreamer struggling against the stifling nature of the City and a man struggling to survive out in the forest.

I liked all of this. The juxtaposition of lives made each section pop. Every POV shift left me wanting more—more insight into the City, more understanding of the social structure of the wild men, more everything. It was fascinating.

Then we get into the proper tension: two women have been found guilty of a serious crime. As the City itself will not enact the death penalty, they evict the condemned into the outside world. It is expected this punishment ends in a quick death.

Here are where things get dicey from a plot perspective.

As established, men only know "women" in the form of a deity—The Lady. Ergo, it stands to reason that if a man were to spot a woman in real life, he would think of her as a god.

The City is not isolated far from the realms of men; men live nearby, and the women summon them to small rooms built into the outside of the city wall. There, they are "blessed" via virtual sex so that the women of the City have plenty of genetic material to choose from when they decide to procreate.

So while a woman would almost certainly die if left to fend for herself... she needn't fend for herself. All she's gotta do is look undeniably female, and the vast, vast majority of men will automatically worship her.

This causes a problem in two ways:

1) it seems like it'd be fairly simple for a woman to survive

2) if she does survive with the help of men, it's not gonna take long for the men to realize that a woman in real life is not omniscient, not omnipotent, and has to go find a ditch to do her business in just like the rest of them. And if this comes to pass, the City risks undermining the power structure that has kept even the idea of rebellion far from mens' minds.

So right off the bat, my ability to suspend disbelief is challenged. And when these women are expelled and immediately realize they could use their deification to their advantage ... I started to check out.

One of the women is killed because her bulky coat obscures her gender, but the other—Birana—retreats to a shrine to the Lady and does what any woman would do: reveals her gender and requests food and shelter.

She joins a tribe of men, where they worship her as a god, but they grow jealous and resentful of each other as they seek her favor. More worryingly, though, the City might know she's alive. And if they do, they'll stop at nothing to kill her.

(But I thought they wouldn't kill women...?)

She escapes with the help of Arvil, a man who she finds surprisingly less repulsive than the rest. They set out searching for a fabled refuge where other escaped women live.

Their episodic travel consumes hundreds of pages, with the real focus being how their relationship shifts and changes. Arvil yearns for Birana, but Birana grapples with her conditioned revulsion to heterosexual sex.

I suspect if I found their evolving relationship entertaining, I would have adored this book.

While I am a romantic, I am not a lover of romance-centric storylines. And—worse—this romance felt a bit hollow to me.

Hundreds of years of planned psychological manipulation predisposes Arvil to both revere women and seek their affections. Birana is the first woman he meets, and bonus, she's young and attractive, just like the virtual sex girls. Of course he's going to become smitten with her! 

I intentionally use "smitten" rather than something more meaningful like "love" because I don't see true love in him. He "yearns" for Birana. His "soul reaches out toward hers." In his sections where he considers his feelings towards Birana, there's nothing to tell me what sort of person Birana is. If Birana's sections didn't exist, all I'd be able to tell you is that she's a woman who isn't completely helpless, and Arvil wants her.

Birana's affections for Arvil are more nuanced and have more weight—she does, after all, have to get past her complete aversion to men to even fancy him in the slightest. They're hampered, though, by her utter dependence on him. Arvil's kept her alive, and he hasn't been rough with her (except for those times when he hits her or says horrible things to her or ...), and he seems willing to do anything to keep other men from harming her. Of course she's gonna grow close to him, and of course—over time and with sexual starvation—that might be mistaken for romantic love.

I could have possibly gotten past all of that, but what convinced me their "love" was shallow is how they respond to hardship. Now, I'll be the first to admit I'm probably judging them too harshly because I've never struggled for survival against insurmountable odds or lost everything close to me. But trauma drives them apart. When things are bad—and almost literally the only thing they have is each other—they're cold towards each other or even cruel. At one point, Birana tells Arvil he can leave, and he shrugs and—dead-eyed and miserable—says, "I'm stuck with you now.

So the book's focus is their relationship, and it's trying to portray a good relationship. Hell, part of the "point" of the book is that Birana and Arvil have finally proven that men and women can love each other as deeply as women love other women. And yet their love feels shallow and born out of desperation/social conditioning.

Some might argue the ramp-up towards the ending proves their love. I don't find that convincing, however, for two reasons.

1) Their "growth" takes place off stage

2) There are external reasons that might cause them to drop some of their resentment and work together

We have pages and pages of them being standoffish or working themselves into this deep hole of resentment, yet none of them putting it behind them?

Speaking of their "growth" taking place off stage, the pacing is strange. So many pages are dedicated to watching Birana travel, one day after another, with little going on, and then close to the end, the book kicks over to a high-level summary. Months and months pass in a blink between POV sections.

We also have a POV character who lives in the City, but hundreds of pages separate her sections. I loved her part when the book started, but when we boomeranged back to her, I could hardly remember any of the more significant points of her story.

There's also the matter of gender. Namely, Sargeant seems to view it as static and dips into gender essentialism. We have men and women; your identity matches your genitals. Women, it seems, are likely to be emotionally mature and prone to egalitarianism when it suits them but catty and emotionlessly cruel to outsiders. Men are brave and jealous, obsessed with power, and yet loyal to a hierarchy.

For the women, I can kinda buy this. They view men as literally sub-human, so no one in the City is likely to come out as a man, and if they did, they'd probably be branded insane and put into intensive care. They're also gonna fight to hide any personality traits deemed "manly."

But the men revere women and have much greater freedom in their expression. Religious fear might prevent any of them from claiming womanhood, but I see no reason why their gender expression is so monolithic. Espescially since men raise the expelled boy-children from the City. Two or more men forming deep bonds with each other and jointly raising a child seems like it's bound to happen. It's basic human psychology.

I dunno. I really wanted to like The Shore of Women, but the only thing that was truly fascinating to me was the world of the women in the City, and those sections were glossed over while countless pages were dedicated to Birana and Arvil walking. It was simply a perfect storm of a novel to lose me.

There’s more I could discuss that would, admittedly, bring more nuance to the table, but I don’t want to spoil things and this review is already plenty long.

Sorry, friend, if you've read this far. I hope you’ll still recommend me books.

Cover art by: Unknown :(