Divine Endurance

The Last Days of Ranaganar #1

by Gwyneth Jones

First edition hardcover with unclipped dust jacket, in very good condition. Jacket edges are slightly creased and nicked. Board corners and spine ends are bumped. Boards are clean, binding is sound and pages are clear. LW

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Cats, Collections, British Literature

233 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Gwyneth Jones is a writer and critic of genre fiction. She's won the Tiptree award, two World Fantasy awards, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the British Science Fiction Association short story award, the Dracula Society's Children of the Night award, the P.K.Dick award, and the SFRA Pilgrim award for lifetime achievement in sf criticism. She also writes for teenagers, usually as Ann Halam. She lives in Brighton, UK, with her husband and two cats called Ginger and Milo; curating assorted pondlife in season. She's a member of the Soil Association, the Sussex Wildlife Trust, Frack Free Sussex and the Green Party; and an Amnesty International volunteer.

Reviews

[Craig Laurance · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange novel set in a far future Asia. Abandoned androids (in the form of a young woman and her cat companion) travel to what is now Indonesia, which is embroiled in an post-apocalyptic political turmoil. The androids are programmed to grant humans their greatest desire. Both androids fulfill their duties, with rather dark consequences. The novel mixes political allegory, metaphysics and a touchingly beautiful lesbian love story. Told in a desultory, opiated prose.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Divine Endurance, the wisest cat that ever lived: memorable.
Craig Laurence's review will give you an idea of the book: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
"A strange novel set in a far future Asia. Abandoned androids (in the form of a young woman and her cat companion) travel .... [M]ixes political allegory, metaphysics and a touchingly beautiful lesbian love story. Told in a desultory, opiated prose."

I should pull down my copy. I think it's based (in part) on her travels in South Asia as a young woman.

[Nick J Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gwyneth Jones is a very talented novelist. Divine Endurance is subtle and complex and is one of the least predictable books I have read. The plot twists and turns yet flows effortlessly, taking on multiple perspectives and addressing weighty subjects with a light touch. The story starts by following the main character, Chosen Among the Beautiful, and her Cat, the titular Divine Endurance, as they make their way through a landscape of fractured, bomb-blasted wastelands, ruined temples and war-torn, poverty-stricken cities. She is on a quest to find her lost brother, Worthy to be Beloved. Along the way she becomes involved with the fallen aristocrat, Derveet, who in exile has taken on the role of a kind of Amazonian warrior-princess, determined to free her people from their subjugation under the mysterious Rulers. From the outset the tone and style is more that of high fantasy than science fiction. The prose is quite stylised and in places I found it a bit of a slog. There are too many characters for my taste and they all seem to have at least two names. At times things can get very confusing. This appears to be deliberate, however. The Cat, which is far more than just a cat, leads us through the more stodgy parts and we begin to feel that she is actually in charge of the other characters' destinies. But this is the kind of story wherein no presumptions are safe. There is a strong feminist theme throughout, with almost all of the characters being female and issues of gender being addressed head-on. At no point does this become preachy, however, and it's all very relevant to the plot. Overall, this is an enigmatic and compelling read that is truly novel, while remaining artfully within the twin conventions of science fiction and fantasy. The latter is the reason for the missing star. Not any fault on the author's behalf, I just prefer straight-up sci-fi. Having said that, I highly recommend Devine Endurance to anyone with an interest in either genre, especially if they're looking for a challenge.

[Deb Omnivorous Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did like this strange story very much. The post apocalyptic, sci-fi implications were what drew me to read it but what I actually enjoyed it for were the vivid characterisations of the main actors in it and the fairy-tale like atmosphere of the story.

It does have some problems as a novel however; The reader gets more than a bit lost, at times, almost as if you can feel the author losing their grasp on the plot, or maybe their interest and then recovering and continuing.

It has a lot of things that you have to accept without understanding. Novels which do not answer all your questions are fine by me in general but there are some which take it to an extreme and this is one of them. In true mythic style, the reader never really gets answers to many elements of this story. And books which do this – sometimes I am in the mood for them and sometimes not. Luckily I was when I read this and I enjoyed it.

[Bill Brydon · Rating 5 out of 5]

'You are the best dead hand I have ever seen,' said Cho to the relic. She scratched in the crust of the mound, and found a sleeve. It was a beautiful colour, with shining embroidery. She found a foot too, but the foot was not so interesting. It had lost its leg, and lost its slipper. There was something tangled up in the little bones, a thin fine line of something. She tugged and the mound stirred, as if the dead person felt it."

Derveet wasn’t looking for shelter. She had come to the Peninsula to start a new rebellion. She knew the women had placed a ban on armed revolt after the last disaster, and she accepted that veto. She wanted the Dapur's support in a new kind of warfare; a desperate kind to suit the desperate straits of the country. She spoke of disruption and subversion, secrecy and trickery. She wanted to use women's powers of wisdom, cunning and hidden knowledge, in the man's domain of war

[Tim Pendry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Divine Endurance was a disappointment largely because it was self-indulgent experimentalism in high science fantasy by someone who was clearly intellectually way ahead of the bulk of genre writers but who missed the point about narrative - out there is a reader who must comprehend.

In her later work, Jones manages to remember this fact and not lose her remarkable ability to conjure up entirely alien ways of being and thinking but the fact that you needed a well argued and well written lengthy postscript to understand what you had just read is a failure.

Having said that, Jones in 1984 was clearly a major talent and I suspect is still underrated outside the genre 'industry'. All the components of the Aleutian Trilogy are here waiting to be formed into something effective and reasonably comprehensible at first reading.

This negative assessment is a shame because the book needed only a little tweaking to ensure the reader understood better who was who and the rules and evolution of the cultures in which they operated. It did not need spelling out just harder work to fill gaps.

What we have is a lengthy and very occasionally boring and overwrought story the meaning of which is occulted by style. The evocation of a future South East Asia which has drifted 'back' into 'new traditionalisms' is brilliant as is the characterisation of the players.

The advanced 'toys' do not, in this case, have to be explained - Cho, her brother and the sentient cat Divine Endurance - are perhaps the most comprehensible actors in the tale. It is the relationship between them and humanity that lacks comprehensibility.

Jones' allusive and elusive style could be seen as magical, the essence of high fantasy. The science fiction aspects are carefully positioned as framework for a story that is as much political and ethnographical as fantasy. The writing taken in small gobbets is superb,

Yet, by the end, we need the postscript to explain and that is not good enough. We have a sense of what might have happened by the end but the subtleties are lost to all but the author. And we admire the writing but soon cease to care as the work becomes something we have to work through.

Of course, a truly great work would simply be re-read with the postscript to hand but I tried that for a while and gave up because the text was inherently 'jumpy', leaping from moment to moment without adequate explanatory hints or connections.

That postscript though is worth searching out. It gave me more pleasure than the book itself because it was coherent, subtle and intelligent and introduced some sophisticated and thoughtful (and compassionate) 'feminist' ideas on genre literature as relevant today as in the 1980s.

[William Connolley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Divine Endurance is a weird book. It is well worth a read; if you haven't, do that first, because any explanation will tend to spoil it. If you don't like books in which much is unexplained, or in which things only become slowly clear, then find something else. Having said that, the flaws are more obvious on a second reading. And it isn't quite clear where Flowerdust fits in; just an episode, I think.

The attraction of the book is largely in its tone; and to some extent it shares this with White Queen. Elegaic, unruffled, unhurried, tolerant of people and of disaster.

But ah the downsides: and here I shall wax philosophical; bear with me, it is worth it, I think. I've been reading Popper recently; The Open Society and its Enemies, Volume 2, Hegel and Marx. And Popper is strongly critical of what he calls "historicism" or in Marx's case "historical prophecy": in essence, the idea that history has its own meaning, its own destiny; teleology, perhaps. And if you hear that, you begin to see the backbone of a lot of sci-fi novels; perhaps a lot of novels in general. And this one in particular: much of the beauty is in the characters learning to accept their "destiny"; the long slow downwards slope of their world into death. But it is all nonsense, and pernicious nonsense at that; and (as I said before) all too common.

Update: reading GJ's article on the book at her website, it is clear that she thinks the book is about something else. But as the author she is in some ways blind to what it actually says, because of course she knows what she meant it to say. So take, for example, the way the dolls "know" that they shouldn't fixup various "surface" problems because the humans don't want those problems fixed. Like Derveet's fatal illness. Then stop and think: how does that make sense? It doesn't, except in the all-is-predestined manner that I've already pointed out is Bad.

But I should add something positive: which is that the view of society, and the bizarre sexuality in which essentially all important people are homosexual, just makes perfect sense and all fits together; is very well done.

From: http://wmconnolley.blogspot.com/2017/...

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I blame Wizards versus Lesbians for this one.
And myself for getting the kindle version of a book that I really needed to sit down with in a print version and just spend time on rather than read in small spurts throughout my day.
I don't know if I would have liked it more, but I would have appreciated what it was doing more. Or possibly followed it better and thus appreciated it more.
And if you want complicated thinky scifi that is, unfortunately, getting more relevant rather than less, this is very much that.

[Mckinley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read the short story version which seemed incomplete.(!) Wasn't into it enough to track down the full story.

[Shane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting concept, well-written, but I don't feel I got anything about of it.

[Brent Winslow · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this but found myself constantly lost in the narrative. The story had potential, but was just too complicated and ultimately exhausting.

[Sydney Brammer · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️s for ‘Divine Endurance.’ Complex and surprising. I love a speculative fiction airplane read, though my fear of android politics has not been quelled.

[Lutz Barz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating writer who manages to evoke other worldliness into a world reality that is persuasive as a fantasy.

[Channah]

Picked this up for free at a random library giveaway when in need on vacation. It was better than I expected but still not very good.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard to summarize this book. A magical wish-granting sex robot, broken from her conception, searching through a post-post-apocalyptic Malaysia for her twin brother, who might be the key to her own repair. There is also a robot cat, a noble warrior princess, a dying wizard-cult, and the most complex gender politics you will ever read in a novel.

If you like science fiction, you should read this. If you read science fiction and think "this society is too simplistic" you should _definitely_ read this.

[Salimbol · Rating 4 out of 5]

An Intriguing book, set in a post-apocalyptic Asia. It was first published in 1984, and it feels like it must have been ahead of its time, with its refreshingly non-Western cast of characters, and explorations of the spectrum of sexuality. It's as complex and challenging as anything Jones has written (I know that I read its sequel many years ago, but I can't remember anything about it that relates to this first book), but at the same time is one of her more reader-friendly books. Plus, of course, one of the narrators is a cat (bonus points for that!).

[Kristi Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a strange sad book. I didn't really understand why Cho and Wo were bringing the end of the world... Although the Nirvana mention was a tip... I suppose that means the Rulers were human too? Still, there must have been more to it than that.

I wonder, what made the angel dolls? I suppose it didn't survive them.

[tish · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to love this so much. The collection of Jones's essays I'm reading now is so smart and enjoyable that I just expected her fiction to be brilliant. I'm definitely going to try something else by her, but I found Divine Endurance to be a bit of a mess. Some exciting ideas, but too little character development and too little world building.

[Abby Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

A young girl robot is raised in isolation by an ancient cat robot as technology fails all around them, her brother as an infant was released into the world so as the system that supported all technology on the world has gone into meltdown she goes on a quest to find him and some purpose for her life… she has not yet met a real person…

[T · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this and liked the beginning a lot, but then it got scattered and what was happening became unclear and it threw too many other characters and political factions at me. It came back together somewhat at the end, but I'd rather have just followed Cho and Divine Endurance and Derveet more closely all the way.

[Ang H · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author has some great world-building ideas and details and I hope she uses them in another story. But the characters here never interested me and I began skipping sections hoping for something to happen. It was just boring instead of magical. Not sure why.

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

An amazing book in that I barely understood what was happening but stuck with it for the poetry and the entropy. The author explains all in an afterword which also reveals a deep understanding of multiple genres.

[Xdyj · Rating 4 out of 5]

The beginning is fairytale like but it soon goes to harsh reality. I like the writing and many of its themes are quite relevant in real world (iykwim).

[Stig Edvartsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has all the right ambitions (helpfully explained in an afterwords of sorts) but for me the story was lost in the clutter of characters, motivations, nations, details of the story and the need to make everything so very, very vague and mystical. It's a bit like watching a painting of a favourite person rendered in a style you don't understand.