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WoGF Review: Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler
Thom Denholm (Thomcat) works in the software industry and as a baseball umpire. In his spare time, he has kept up a steady stream of reading, fiction and non-fiction, since he was old enough to enter a library “summer reading” contest. He first read “A Wrinkle in Time” before it was extended into a series, only coming back to read the subsequent books recently. He joined WWEnd last year, too late to really dive into the GMRC but signed up for the WoGF challenge immediately, and he’s looking forward to a functioning “random author picker”. : )
Karen Joy Fowler‘s first novel was Sarah Canary, and this well recognized work was added to the list of Science Fiction Masterworks just last year. I left one spot open on my list of authors for the Women of Genre Fiction reading challenge, and upon discovering the setting of this book, it was added to the final slot.
First off, there are editions of this book with a foreword or an epilog, and reviews a plenty warning not to read either. The Plume trade paperback edition seems to lack both, at least by that name, and besides has a nice easy typeface.
Mechanically the book has Roman numeral sections with bits of relevant history. Each sets the tone for the few numbered chapters that follow – an introduction to the action, as it were. Most are set in my own state, what was Washington Territory at the time. The facts in these sections are rarely brought back into play later in the book, giving this novel an episodic feel.
WoGF Review: Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler
Jonathan Thornton (thrak) is a long-time science fiction and fantasy reader, but has only just started writing reviews on his blog Golden Apples of the West. Outside of reading, his interests are music and insects. His new year’s resolution is to review more of the books he has read on WWEnd and maybe finally get round to writing his own SF novel that he’s always talking about.
“It might even be true. It was not for him to know. A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it. What we say occupies a very thin surface, like the skin over a body of water. Beneath this, through the water itself, is what we see, sometimes clearly if the water is calm, sometimes vaguely if the water is troubled, and we imagine this vision to be the truth, clear or vague. But beneath this is yet another level. This is the level of what is and this level has nothing to do with what we say or what we see.”
Sarah Canary is one of SF’s most powerful explorations of the Other. Fittingly for a book about First Contact, it deals with alienation. But Sarah Canary doesn’t act as a filter to give us a fresh perspective on humanity as much as a focal point that draws in the novel’s motley crew of disenfranchised. Sarah Canary isn’t really the protagonist; she doesn’t actually do much, we never find out anything about her motivations or thoughts, and Fowler deliberately leaves her true nature ambiguous. She’s a walking Outside Context Problem, and how the various characters perceive and react to her reveals the prejudices, concerns and fears of the 1870’s America she mysteriously appears in.
