Subject: Dean: The Dubious Hills

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 1994 20:02:10 GMT

It's worth starting with a clarification:  Cover blurbs to the contrary
notwithstanding, "The Dubious Hills" is essentially unrelated to the
Secret Country trilogy.  Which is too bad, because the trilogy was
excellent, tand "The Dubious Hills" is not.

The books is set in the same milieu, in the sense that there are some
familiar references, but it would make no difference to the book if
those references were changed so that the book was set in Scorpio or
Schenectaday.  (The one bit of mileage that Dean specifically gets from
placing "The Dubious Hills" in the milieu of "The Secret Country" is 
that she gets to continue her game of using our world's poems as
that world's spells.)

It's not a bad book, but it's too ambitious:  Dean chose a difficult
premise and was unable to make it work.

Centuries ago, a group of wizards, experimenting to find a way to 
prevent war, cast a spell which changed human nature in the Dubious
Hills.  Each inhabitant, upon maturity, gains knowledge of one
field of expertise -- and is generally clueless in other regards.
For instance, Arry, the protagonist, is the local expert on pain:
If you've cut your hand, she'll tell you that your hand hurts.
Otherwise you wouldn't know.  There's another character who knows
about beauty and ugliness, and can tell you if you've put on
an ugly shirt today.

The inhabitants of the Dubious Hills are able to maintain a simple
life well enough, through cooperation, and generally do not see
anything wrong with their lives.  Then a trio of werewolves appears,
promising freedom from the controlling spell (through lycanthropy).

A major problem with the book is that Dean's concept of knowledge 
is necessarily incoherent and inconsistent.  In order to create
characters we can care about, she has to sever the link between
what people know and what kind of people they are.  In order
to enable them to live even simple lives, she has to give them 
the ability to learn things outside their realms of expertise,
by rote, but it's not clear how that differs from the way *we*
learn things.  And it's far from clear what 'knowledge' is:
Is a particular color scheme intrinsically beautiful or ugly?
Does an expert on mammals know about whales?  (There was a
time when whales were classified as fish.  "Mammals", after
all, is an artificial classification.)  Why can the person
who 'knows' how to fix things fix broken limbs or chairs,
but not cobble up a cure for broken DNA sequences?  (For that
matter, 'fixing' is an artificial term as well, since a
broken chair may qualify as fine firewood or clubs or scenery.)

In general, the premise requires so much handwaving, to make
it work, as to be incoherent.  The interesting core of the novel
is young Arry and her personal problems, and that's not enough to
carry the novel.

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

	Who didn't melt down, but whose computer did.