Darkborn, by Alison Sinclair

[snarp]

Dr. Balthasar Hearne and his wife Telmaine Hearne are Darkborn, a blind people who are cursed to die if they come into contact with light, and navigate via sonar, which they call “sonning.” Their roughly Victorian-era world is populated half by their own people, and half by the Lightborn, who are vulnerable to darkness in the same way the Darkborn are to light. One night Tercelle Amberley, a woman Balthasar once knew, comes to him about to give birth - and her children, incredibly, are born sighted. Meanwhile, Telmaine meets the battle-scarred, traumatized wizard Ishmael de Studier, and finds for the first time that she may have met someone from whom she can’t hide her darkest secret - that she is a powerful wizard, something shunned in Darkborn society.

The setting of the book was interesting, particularly the strange ways the Darkborn and Lightborn find to communicate. I appreciated that Telmaine, who in this sort of story would usually end up staying at home cheerleading, was by far the most active of the main characters, and the driving force of the action for most of the last part of the book.

I liked the idea of a race of people who using sonar, but had a lot of issues with the execution, when Sinclair made it just a little bit too much like sight. For instance, there’s a scene where one character sonns another character’s face “framed in the open window.” …what, exactly, are all these blind people likely to be framing? It’s nitpicky, yeah, but little details like that make or break a book’s ability to convince you of its world’s reality. I was never convinced of this one.

The characterization suffers a similar problem with consistency - except for me, this one is much worse. Cut for a spoiler:

Telmaine and Ishmael find themselves falling in love. The way the two of them and Balthasar react to this does not exactly make a lot of sense.

Ishmael has led a painful life, rejected by his family and by society because of his magical powers, whose pride is entirely dependent on his belief in his own integrity. Telmaine’s fear of rejection of the sort Ishmael has suffered has consumed her life, and she values her position as a proper wife and mother above all other things; and Balthasar (the least-developed of the three) is a shy, emotionally vulnerable person who, from what we see of him, seems to be the passive one in the marriage, dependent on Telmaine to lead their relationship.

For all three of them, this situation should be horrifying. I think that for Telmaine in particular, who has spent her life lying to everyone she loves to maintain her identity as a good society wife, it ought to be literally unthinkable. Yet they’re all peculiarly accepting of it. There are some moments of angst and jealousy, but they’re perfunctory, and in general much too nice - no one ever gets angry. Like the sonar, I don’t buy it.

This is the first in the trilogy, and it ends on basically a very sharp cliffhanger. I’ll read the next book when it comes out, but I’m not optimistic about any book that has this love triangle as the central emotional conflict. I’m almost hoping for a ten-year timeskip to let the kids grow up or something, cliffhanger or no.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

Comments

[onetarot.livejournal.com]

Coming out of nowhere, I am a little confused at your confusion of the concept of framing and sonar.

Now, if you had said that the Darkborn had perceived someone through a closed window, then I could understand the problem. But a precise sonar reading of someone standing in front of an open window would, I should think, very much appear to be framed, i.e. surrounded in a roughly symmetrical way, by the blackness of an open window. I am using "black" in the sense of "no image".

Or am I misunderstanding the problem?

[snarp]

Basically, my issue is that a society of blind people is not going to have any use for 2D art. If you're unfamiliar with 2D art, there's no reason for that turn of phrase to come to mind.

[onetarot.livejournal.com]

While I understand why you might say that, I would honestly have my suspension of disbelief painfully stretched if such an eight century-old and presumably sophisticated society did not have copious examples of 2D art.

Consider: if a Darkborn culture has written language (presumably by etching), they have a concept of preserving 2D information. If they have that concept, they would have diagrammatic etchings. If they have literal diagrams and maps, they might have a well-established artistic culture. Framing an etching makes as much sense to me as framing a photograph and would be done for the same purpose.

I imagine Starry Night by Van Gogh would be fascinating to them.

[snarp]

Apologies for the length here - I'm trying to articulate why the idea seems so impossible to me.

As they do have writing and, I'm pretty sure, maps, I'll concede the likelihood of some sort of cultural tradition of etchings. However, the way in which sighted people see something as "framed" is dependent on the concept of the visual, which allows a sighted person to see something that's basically flat - like a painting or an etching - but comprehend it as three-dimensional. In this way, from a fixed viewpoint, a sighted person can either see a person who's six feet tall standing four feet outside the window with a tree thirty feet behind him, or see a photograph or etching of the same scene, and - with a small amount of mental extrapolation - get all the same information from both.

However, if one's way of negotiating the world is defined by depth and texture, an etching or a bas-relief would not be a form that could directly represent that person outside the window in the way that they could for sighted human beings.* Assuming here that, unlike at least some real blind-since-birth people, a member of an entire race of blind people would lack any ability to conceptualize the visual, I don't expect that any sort of etchings such a people might produce would be comprehensible to a sighted person. Some sort of symbolic language would need to be in place to make them mutually comprehensible to the creators and their audience.

So, while Starry Night or The Fairy Fellers' Master-Stroke or other highly-textured paintings would be interesting to members of this culture in an anthropological way - "this is how those other guys sonn things!" - I don't think they would be understandable without some amount of study. A concept of the visual would be necessary to make sense the textures of these paintings, which represent their subjects as seen, not as heard or felt. An actual night sky over a city, or group of fairies, would not represent itself in the same way to a person who negotiates the world via depth.

So, given that an etching can't easily be made to represent reality to the hypothetical people I've described, I think it's unlikely that the woman on the other side of the open window would be read as "framed," because the perception of a physical person or object, and of an etched depiction of that person or object, would be so different. The comparison might come to mind for an artist or art lover, or someone else who spends a lot of their time dealing with these abstract objects, but not, I think, to an ordinary person.

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* The bas-relief would come closer, but I'm sitting here imagining that as a modern art-form that all the book's upper-class Victorian matrons look down on as too radical and want to censor.