When Voiha Wakes

Vandarei #3

by Joy Chant

This is the tale of a love that shattered a world, between a woman destined to be queen and the young man who stole her heart with the magic of his music. Rahike was Young Mistress of Naramethe, an exotic land of spine and wine where women ruled and men lived at their pleasure. Mairilek was a humble potter, beautiful and graceful and strong, who defied custom to play the music forbidden to men, and loosed the power of the ancient sleeping gods upon the earth.

Genres: Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Fiction, High Fantasy, Romance, Young Adult

Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Joy Chant is the pen name of Eileen Joyce Rutter. She is a British fantasy writer, best known for the three House of Kendreth novels, published 1970 to 1983. Born in London, she started writing in her early teens. She began publishing her writing while working as a Schools Librarian in London. She attended college in Wales, where her father had been stationed during World War II. Later, she lived with her husband and children in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex.

Red Moon and Black Mountain won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award in 1972. The Grey Mane of Morning was a runner for the same award in 1981, with tenth place in the Locus Poll Award the same year. When Voiha Wakes won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award in 1984. The High Kings, which took second place in the Locus Poll Award, won the 1984 World Fantasy Special Award for Professional Work. lieutenant was also a nominee of the Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book.

Reviews

[Valerie]

There are two editions of this book, and I own copies of both.

One edition has a preview of Chant's non-Vandarei book The High Kings. I have read neither the preview nor the book itself. I get the impression that it's set in Ireland.

One geographical point: many of the Vandarei stories are set in the southern hemisphere. So rivers, for example run north, and to go north is to head toward the equator.

In the first book, there was some attempt to create a Vandarin fauna. This was apparently abandoned later: in this book, both flora and fauna are pretty clearly terrestrial. In fact, they're not even as varied as are those found on Earth. No marsupials, for example--and nothing resembling the terrestrial variety of non-mammals. A grass-based culture--not only in the plains, either. The crops are wheats and other cereal grains. There may be western hemisphere imports like corn, but that's not clear, because Chant, being British, uses the term 'corn' to refer to all cereal crops.

I should point out that Chant had a fondness for festival display, so she represents the feasts, arts, and parades of Vandarei very skillfully. It's easy to imagine her as a child, staging parades, dances, etc. Perhaps designing artwork, costumes, etc as well. Then she would probably have felt the need to go back and explain to herself 'what it's all about'. The stories may very well have started as a sort of mythological basis for the shows.

Chant's skill at characterization and plotting is sure--there are few false starts or trailing ends, but the people are complex and human. It would be interesting to see her juvenalia, to see if she had to develop these skills slowly, or took to it like an otter to the river. The poetic language suggests a holistic development. But lacking early sources, it's hard to be sure. Quite likely Chant rewrote her early volumes...but it may be that she simply submitted them for publication as she'd composed them.

This volume represents well the problems faced by an artist in a society that has very few artists--only craftsmen, generally. The society is humane and peaceful, and has very few mechanisms of coercion: but public opinion is very powerful. There are mechanisms for accommodating the different, but they're not very satisfactory. So the artist is continually frustrated, lacking guidance and facilities. This is a problem not only for the artist himself, but for the society as a whole, especially the artist's loved ones.

In a society where men and women live apart, and only men (and all men) are in the crafts, while women are involved in farming, labor, scholarship, and government, there must be many situations in which such frustrations develop. What of the born craftswoman? The scholarly man? The political man? Even political women have problems fitting in. And loners are regarded as odd and not quite sane.

The accommodations for the different are improvisational. The Halilaki say that it cannot be otherwise, at least until the dreaming Voiha wakes. They don't really wish for that time--they're generally not that dissatisfied with their lives. But now and then the cloak of Voiha has to be put out to protect someone--or some other solution must be developed. This is such a story, told from the point of view of the Young Mistress of Naramethe. Even Rahike isn't particularly eager to change things--she likes her life the way it is. But she's wary of allowing a Goddess's voice to be stifled--and when she's told to leave the Goddess to tend to her own, she responds with a classic retort: 'What did the goddesses create mortal women for, if they have to do all the work themselves?'.

There may be no gracious solution to the problems of the true artist in an orderly society. This is an account of one attempted solution: full of the juices of life and the pangs associated with any childbearing labor--and overthrowing the even tenor of the lives of placid and comfortable people--at least for a while. The hagiographies that will probably develop in the future about the craft hero (read 'saint') Mairilek are anticipated, and the argument is made that even his remarkable physical beauty will be forgotten--and certainly the pangs felt by the people of Naramethe wouldn't make it into the final version. This book is very good at depicting the human lives behind the shadow-play of the myths. Now if a born playwright should arise among the Halilaki...well, that's Chant's role, isn't it?

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

The languid, deeply considered pace is not for everyone. The deconstruction of society slices gender roles in ways both familiar and strange: not only do men and women live separately and "just visit now and then" as Katharine Hepburn put it but the menfolk are exclusively craftsmen while the women farm and organize and manage external governance. It is a system as restrictive as any other and one especially brittle when considering Mairilek, whose gifts represent an outside context problem: a craft without a tradition or fellowship, and one whose value is not seen within this township. It is differently imperfect.

While gorgeously written--"her strides pushed the miles steadily behind her"--it is not exactly compelling, forcing the reader deep into the emotional state of the characters to truly appreciate the staggeringly bittersweet ending. In other hands the plot would culminate in violence or signs of a drastic societal change, but not here. Here, there is an imperfect solution for a societal imperfection that might eventually change the norms.

[Ruin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just picked this book up because of the interesting name, and was surprised how much I loved reading it. It was the kind of rich, immersive fantasy I long to write and hope every fantasy novel will be. Easy to read, hard to put down, and leaving me deeply invested in the characters.

I don't think any summary I've read has done justice to the real content of the novel. It has a slice-of-life quality that the plot grows so naturally out of. It made me care deeply about Rahike and really believe in Naramethe, in her problems and joys and in the problems and joys of the city.


[Mild Spoilers]
The ending was more bittersweet than I usually like. After being so invested in Rahike it really hurt me. But it wasn't needlessly sad or cruel in any way, and it was a very poignant ending considering the title of the book and the meaning behind it.

[IVellon · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my opinion, the story of this book is quite boring ... to much love and music for me :D
But the world building was great, I especially liked that the matriarchy is depicted as completly natural and that it's not really part of the conflict. This allows to reflect on the society in the book from one's very own perspective.

[Stephen Poltz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting read. I had a lot of trouble getting into it. In the middle, I kind of finally got into the main plot. Then I loved the last forty pages. This is a short book, only 160 pages, and it takes most of it to the get the punch it packs. It’s basically a love story in a world where men are only meant for the crafts (pottery, carpentry, etc.) and women do everything else including govern. Most importantly, music is not valued, and is not seen as a viable craft for a man. It’s set in the same world as Red Moon and Black Mountain, but it is a self-contained story. It won the 1984 Mythopoeic Award. I don’t believe it was so good to win an award, but there are no other nominees listed for that year. I checked the Mythopoeic Society’s website and for 1984, it says that the other nominees are not available. I would have liked to have seen who else was considered that year.

Come visit my blog for the full review…
https://itstartedwiththehugos.blogspo...

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/when-voiha-wakes-by-joy-chant/

It’s about unorthodox love in a pastoral society where men and women live separately, with women doing the hard work of parenting and agriculture (and indeed governing) and men floating around as craftsmen, doing occasional impregnation.

I didn’t find the premise terribly believable; of course it’s a utopia, but I wondered how such a society could come to be, and how often situations like the (supposedly unprecedented) forbidden love between the protagonists would occur. So I’m afraid I wasn’t engaged by the plot, though I can see how it would appeal to some readers.

[Heather Yeats Trawick · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has been decades since I read this book in the 80s. As a teenage girl the book was amazing because gender roles are completely switched with males being smaller and dressing to please the stronger females. Not only that but the sexes are pigeon holed into certain professions. It was the first exposure I had in a novel to the idea that our societal norms are very limiting and it got me questioning how I could break them.

[Sue Bridgwater · Rating 5 out of 5]

When Voiha wakes is set in the land of Halilak, a country within Joy Chant’s invented world of Khendiol. Here Chant establishes exactly the kind of society she needs in order to throw into relief the question of gender and identity; how important a strand in the weaving of the self-image it may be, that a particular society sets a particular value on certain qualities in its male and female members. Halilak is a Matriarchy, and many of Chant’s points are made simply through the fact of that inversion.
The female protagonist Rahike is twenty-eight and a mother; her lover Mairilek is twenty-four. Yet Chant is still concerned with change and growth, acknowledging that the turbulence of adolescence is not by any means the last trial of our identity or our moral allegiance. And although the Gods are not physically present, they are still in evidence – in female manifestations; Iranani the Dancer is Karinane in Halilak and the pressure to do good according to an inward sense of right is very strong. Rahike has to consider the demands and needs of the society in which she finds herself. But there is the possibility of change in the pattern of society, of a shift in the structure of the world as her people have always accepted it, and because this is bound up with the pattern of her personal life it is she who has to be the first of her people to accept the novelty, to embrace it rather than turning away in fear. And to do this even though it brings her personal sorrow, Rahike has to take a step into greater maturity.
She would have considered herself mature enough at the opening of the story. In this land ruled by women, Rahike is among the leaders of society, a skilled administrator who has been appointed Young Mistress and will succeed the Mistress as ruler at the latter’s death. She has a fine house and beloved little daughter. She acquires a handsome young lover – there are no marriages, for the men live apart in the Men’s Town – and seems to have everything she could wish for. But she falls deeply in love with young Mairilek, and he with her. So he confides to her his love and great gift for music; and this leads her into the area of novelty and the forbidden. Music has no status or official recognition in Naramethe, and Mairilek is seen as a useless and possibly even dangerous character by the other men and by many of the women. He does not fit into the traditional pattern of his society, and no-one knows what to do with him. Before they become lovers, even Rahike reflects; “The Craft-Laws were men’s mysteries, and no affair of hers, but she knew music was not a craft. And a man must be a craftsman. Such a passion as Mairilek’s was folly: was worse: was dishonourable; and she saw the justice of the low esteem he suffered.”
Here Mairilek’s uniqueness, his individuality, are seen to have no scope for expression within the confines of his society. Yet Rahike is to help Mairilek overcome the constraints imposed by those confines. The inversion of the male/female position helps to point up more strongly Chant’s ideas about the potential constrictions any society may place on the individuals within it. In extreme cases there may be no scope for true individuation at all. “He can only choose from what is offered. What real choice has he?” asks Rahike when she has come to see the truth about Mairilek’s situation. Other women cannot accept this insight; Rahike has taken a major step in learning to see what life must be like for an oppressed group within a society. Her own position of power and authority is great enough to enable her to manipulate events to her own benefit. She might have called upon the sacred names of custom and tradition in order to bind Mairilek to her. But it is she who has the courage to go against custom, encouraging the timid young man to take the enormously daring step of leaving Naramethe to join a group of wandering musicians whose Master will foster his great talent. This is done at tremendous costs to herself; she is expecting Mairilek’s child – though he would never have known of his paternity, as the mystery of conception is one of the facts kept from the men by the women. Yet he would have shared and enhanced her joy in the child. She loses a great deal by this self-sacrificial act;
“The road that led him from her was also the road that led to his craft-brothers, and to the glory that belonged to him. He would walk lightly again. Already he had the love that would heal him, console him for what he had lost. Maybe he would never love another woman, but he would have what he had always loved most. While she: she knew she was maimed. ……For her spring was over, and the time of flowering would never come again.”
In Rahike’s story Chant has remained true to her own idea of the Quest Fantasy as “ …… an ordeal, a testing and a judgement.” It is the closing phrase of this novel that is most telling; “Her heart rose, and she pushed it down: learning the lesson he had learned as a small boy: enduring reality.”

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read this book before and I believe I like it way more this time. It's set in a matriarchal society where men's role is crafts (carpentry, pottery, etc.) but the female protagonist falls for a guy who wants to be a musician, which is not a craft and not a fit job for a man. The story is nicely done, but what really leapt out at me is how well Chant portrays the setting. Unlike some books, she's not presenting the matriarchal culture as some kind of idealized world--it's nice, but just as messy and convoluted and irrational as real life.