Bellamy's
Looking Backward
is just one of many Utopia stories where some current-day narrator arrives in a distant and glorious future. Here, instead, the Person from a distant future, maybe not our own, arrives in a bleak past - England ca. 1930.
The hermaphroditic and nameless Person arrives at a farmer's house, unaware of the language, customs, or overwhelming importance of being cast as male or female. The Person's zen-like rationality and un-emotional manner tend to discomfort all the "sub-humans" (i.e., us) around. So, after getting some grip on English language, English manner, and womanly identity, the Person moves on to the second of four case studies.
Instead of the modern-day peasantry, the new host is an Anglican minister. I was glad the tone of the book lightened a bit - the first section offered little but unremitting horror at the food, drink, air, clothes, manners, sexuality, and social rules of the hosts. True, Burdekin had plenty worth criticizing, but the blanket of negativity became stifling after a while. The Person's interactions with the priest were a bit more collegial. In fact, he appreciated the Person's cool reason enough to accept it himself, at the cost of his religious faith. The Person didn't make him an atheist. Quite the opposite, it was the Person's contagious, pervasive, and immediate sense of the divine that convinced him that being a go-between for his parish and his god was pointless, if not heretical.
The Person maintains a womanly identity during the next case study, rooming with a woman of then-current time. This gave plenty of chance for understanding and commenting on gender roles, the major theme of this book. Then, in the final section, the Person takes on male identity to study a man of the times. It's not at all clear to me why Burdekin chose a serial murderer of children for study, unless she considered that the awful endpoint of all things masculine. As in previous encounters, the Person's calming aura (and bits of telepathy) did much to heal that broken mind. The story ends abruptly, as the Person wakes from the dream of our time, cutting off resolution of that final encounter.
This book seems appreciated largely as an early Feminist screed. Except for the dark fog-bank of negativism in the first few dozen pages, I found it an interesting if atypical approach to the utopian/dystopian genre. It dives deeply into what was wrong with the society of that day (and ours), but weakens where you might expect discussion of what might be better. Unless you're a rabid reader of u-/dys-topias or feminist literature, you might give this a pass.
-- wiredweird
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