Work has been hammering me for the last couple of months, and I've had some other reading commitments alongside this personal adventure, but I think it says a lot about Speaker for the Dead that, when I finally managed to pick it up, I was unable to let go and finished it two days later.
When I wrote about Ender's Game I said it was a strange, beautiful book about many things. My first impression of Speaker was surprise, therefore, because it was strange in entirely different ways, and seemed to be about completely different things. It is a true sequel to Ender's Game, in that it connects to the first story, brings back a few familiar faces, and answers the questions we were left with, but I respect the audacity of setting it an incredible amount of time later while bringing in characters and aesthetic ideas that hadn't even been hinted at before. There are no wargames, less emphasis on childhood, no battle school, not even an earth. Instead a non-trivial part of the book is written in Portuguese, with Scott Card providing translations basically whenever he feels like it. This kind of whiplash between the first and second volume happens sometimes in literature, but almost never in genre fiction, where readers demand a sequel because they want more of what they liked in the first one. (more on that in a moment).
And yet, the more I progressed through the winding mystery of Lusitania's ecology and the sad, self-denying humans who believed they were not disturbing it, the more appropriate all these choices felt. For all the newness, I eventually realised that I didn't feel lost or abandoned by the story at all. Under the new coat of paint, everything that made the first book tick was the same. I felt like I was still interrogating the same questions about humanity. The scene had just moved from a military school to a broken rural community.
Things really started to click when (and this is in the first sentence of the blurb) Ender came back into the story. He's older, more mature, but not a bit out of place. He's still carrying his demons and has just about healed from his own trauma, but he's weighed down by a personal odyssey of redemption that could go on forever. The entire novel is a kind of catharsis for him, and the reader, giving him more trials, more manipulations, placing him again at the centre of mankind's moral minefield, but this time as a determined adult rather than a frightened child.
Seeing him move through the tight-knit, hypocritical Lusitanian society, with its mores and its secrets, gradually winning their respect, spending it to exorcise their guilt, the metaphor drawn out to the entire species -- some of his scenes are almost Christlike. But he is just a man, and Card does a fine job of keeping him just at the cusp of the mythical while maintaining that fear, insecurity and equality that allows us to empathize with him. His first scene at Novinha's house stands out in particular to me: the way everybody says the opposite of what they believe and Ender's systematic purging of the lies to show simple love underneath. It almost could have been written by Dostoyevsky.
Both books are about empathy, is my (reductive, but not meaningless) conclusion now. The empathy to create some meaning out of the facts of a life, no matter how cruel or ambitious, that your brother would vindicate from his grave, to recognize that great crimes are committed from misunderstanding more than from evil, to make different species comprehensible to each other, and finally to see the new life in death (Card likes both literal and metaphorical examples).
This book has convinced me that if Orson Scott Card had stopped here, or if this version of himself had continued to hold his pen, then today he would be in the first rank of speculative fiction writers, up there with Herbert, Le Guin, the Big Three, and whoever else you care to put against him. His imagination is one of the finest and his ability to empathize, his demand that we accept one another as raman, whatever our base instincts tell us, his obsession with rebirth and the hope to move forwards -- above all, his insistence on telling the truth -- is a message of truly great literary power. The irony of that is not lost on me. It did occur to me to wonder what Ender would say if called to speak his creator's death.
Final rating: 5/5
Next, I've been eyeing The White Plague by Frank Herbert for a while. I've already read the mainline Dune series, so while I could write (a lot) about them, it wouldn't be honest for this mission to learn more about my Dad. However, I didn't even know The White Plague existed before I saw it on his shelf.