panguitch's Full Review: Orson Scott Card - The Folk of the Fringe
In a simpler age it was ostensibly possible to find all of Orson Scott Card’s short fiction in three volumes: Maps in a Mirror, Capitol/The Worthing Saga, and The Folk of the Fringe. While this is no longer strictly true, it’s a rare thing when Card writes short fiction anymore. In fact, almost all of his dozens of stories were published before 1982. The five stories in The Folk of the Fringe came as the first postscript to his short story career, and it took a pressure-cooker writing workshop to squeeze them out of him.
West
In the wake of World War III America has ceased to exist, though there are scattered communities of survivors, clinging to retrograding civilization. As society turns counterclockwise, the Mormons of Greensboro, North Carolina, are forced to repeat the Mormon experience of the nineteenth century. Fleeing murder and persecution, a handful resolve to trek to Zion, to the mountains of Utah.
Jamie Teague, a loner from the hills, happens across them. Happens to save them from the deathtrap the authorities have sent them to. And happens to find he can’t part ways with them. These naïve city-dwellers would certainly die on their own in the wilderness. They can’t pay him with money, but Jamie agrees to be their guide.
If this is the second-coming, it’s somewhat less glorious than expected. The characters must deal with this, with the slaughter of hundreds of their people, and with the varying personal baggage each carries. And Teague has to keep them alive. Everyone on this journey carries a burden, and when the heaviest is revealed it will pull your soul down to the floor of your gut. Thankfully, salvation follows soon, like the bright star of morning, washing night into shadow, shadow into day.
Card is at his best here, depicting characters whose interiors are shredded in a way no other author can match. Perhaps "Lost Boys" is his only other story that has rent me like "West." As a Mormon, it touches deep cultural nerves for me. But any human familiar with guilt and pain will feel its force.
Salvage
The climate has changed. Utah’s Great Salt Lake is rising to its prehistoric levels, becoming again the inland sea that covered half the state. The spires of the Salt Lake Temple, icon of Mormonism, rise above the surface as ironic monuments to faith.
Faith is something Deaver Teague has no use for. But he’s heard there’s gold at the bottom of that temple, at the bottom of the Mormon Sea. With two friends he defies the patrols and takes a boat full of diving equipment to find what he can find, which isn’t, of course, what he expects.
Rather less affecting than "West," "Salvage" is less about one’s own internal experience, and more about understanding the internal experience of others. It’s an expression, I think, of Card’s desire to be understood, a desire for people to look at him as a Mormon and think the faith not alien, but human. To understand that his religion is holy, if for no other reason than it is holy to him.
The Fringe
The "hardest" SF story in this little collection, "The Fringe" explores the ramifications of the rising Mormon Sea, and an increasingly wet climate in formerly arid Utah.
Water alone cannot make the desert sands bloom. Carpenter, a wheelchair-bound schoolteacher filled with loathing for his own body, devises a plan for making the desert support the population being forced from the flooded valleys. But the details of the crop rotations, reminiscent of Frank Herbert’s Dune planetology, are subordinated to an examination of the society on this frontier, where anyone caught stealing from the communal storehouse is punished swiftly.
When Carpenter exposes graft among the settlement’s leadership, the sons of the condemned men, his students, plot a cruel revenge. As he struggles to survive, Carpenter resents his tormentors less than his own handicap, and the tale ultimately turns on the morbid mixture of pride and self-hatred that defines him.
Pageant Wagon
Not knowing better, it would be easy to assume Card’s own childhood was a vast minefield of family dysfunction. Bitterness, betrayal, and open conflict in nuclear families are common threads in so much of his writing. Think of Speaker for the Dead, The Worthing Cronicle, and of all the parade of child characters who emerge from destructive families throughout Card’s work.
In "Pageant Wagon," Card translates an old idea for a musical comedy into a raw family drama. Deaver Teague hitches a ride with a pageant wagon and soon finds himself embroiled in the strangest, most poorly functioning family imaginable. The daughter tries to seduce him, a straying son seems to need saving, and everyone is hoping Deaver will drop his own life and plans, join up with the family, and somehow magically make everything all right.
The meaning of the pageant, traveling among the Fringe towns, perpetuating the myths that define their culture, is well-developed by the story’s end, but what we really care about are these irrational people, this family of malcontents who war between fear of change and lust for it. Most impressively, this cacophony finally swells into a tribute to the idea that family is our treasure, however dearly we may purchase it.
America
My feelings about "America" are mixed. At turns it borders on the offensive, then the intriguing; the structurally clumsy, then the conceptually disturbing. It’s the story of a young teenage boy so hateful of his adulterous father that he comes to hate his own sex drive, pretending this makes him righteous. It’s also the story of a middle-aged Amazon Indian virgin who gives birth to Quetzalcoatl, a demigod who will restore North and South America to the possession of its original inhabitants.
Inarguably fantasy, "America" sits strangely in this collection for other reasons. It incorporates the world of the Fringe, but is somehow at odds with the other stories, even though Sam, the boy, is much like Carpenter from "The Fringe" in his self-loathing. The other stories all share a positive, if complicated, redemptive aspect. Characters in "West" find healing. Characters in "Salvage" find understanding. In "The Fringe" they find forgiveness. In "Pageant Wagon" they find belonging. In "America" there at hints at possibilities of redemption. But these are passed by, opportunities not taken. The ultimate effect is disquieting, and not a consistent note to end the collection with.
Extras
Card supplies an afterword where he tells the story of writing these stories. It’s entertaining and informative, also exhibiting some of the playful egotism that Card, like all theater-people I’ve known, displays in the spotlight. Michael Collings then adds a few words where he retracts an earlier argument that Mormonism and science fiction are incompatible. He now believes Card has proved him wrong, both with The Folk of the Fringe and works like the Alvin Maker series.
The Folk of the Fringe is a relatively small collection of five of Card’s less well-known and later stories. By this point, the popular success of his novels was damping the critical acclaim of his stories. This book may always sit on the, it must be said, fringe of the Card corpus. But thematically, it’s at the heart, whether you consider Card’s own fixation on his body being reflected as Carpenter’s or Sam’s self-loathing, or the overarching redemption discovered as the characters of these stories work to create a new society amid the ruins of the old.
– Panguitch
What do Mormons and cockroaches have in common?
It takes more than a nuclear bomb to get either out of your house.
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