Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper

Hello, Stranger.

Let's talk about Sherri S. Tepper's Beauty.

The Short of It

Plot: After evading a certain sleep-related curse, Beauty ends up exploring far and wide to reconcile her human and fairy ancestry.

Page Count: 412

Award: 1992 Locus Fantasy

Worth a read: No.
Primary Driver: (Plot, World, or Character)
Bechdel Test: Pass
Technobabble: Minimal
Review: A remarkably ambitious book that takes a variety of clever turns, but ultimately unsatisfying. Dragged down by inconsistent pacing and passive characters. A lot of very convenient coincidences are needed for things to line up the way that they do, which grows tiresome. The result is an uneven patchwork of well-trodden tropes, though stitched together in a novel fashion. 

The Medium of It

Spoiler Free!

Writing a spoiler free review of this is a challenge, as things go sideways pretty early on. The starting point is that this is indeed, in part, a take on Sleeping Beauty. Our protagonist is the eponymous Beauty herself, and we join her as she begins to understand her curse and the challenges that may face her. As a character, she is passable, though not particularly interesting. She is a precocious young woman who does not quite fit in - a common enough trope. There are also envious step parents, unacknowledged siblings, a problematic priest - all standbys of fantasy stories.

One of the key issues here is the middling stance taken on how closely to follow the original story. Enough elements need to be the same for it to clearly be the story that we know, but enough things need to be changed for it to feel new. Tepper leans more towards the first part of this - peppering the book with figures fulfilling their standard roles. Doing so is intended to highlight Beauty as someone cut from a different cloth, which works, to a degree - but it flattens all other characters to the point that they are utterly bland.

Perhaps Beauty would be more effective before we were inundated with updated and modified versions of fables, but the balance between tradition and innovation is not met here. 

Things change significantly around 40% of the way into the book, so there's no good way to get into the weirdness without spoilers. I'll leave the spoiler-free material at that, then!

If you're a beauty and you want to give this a read, consider using the following link! I'll get a few cents at no extra cost to you.

Beauty: A Link

The Long of It

Spoilers Ahead!

This book is Forest Gump but for fairy tales, with the addition of time travel SF. Which is, in a word, ambitious. That does not mean that it is effective, but it is a remarkable task to attempt to take on. 

We meet a girl named Beauty. Having read a book at some point, we are aware that she is Sleeping Beauty. It is no surprise when her curse is mentioned. Beauty evades her curse, which is not how the story we know goes. This is where things go off the rails. All of the following transpire throughout the book:

• Beauty leaves her town, which is now frozen, and stumbles into a film crew from the future documenting the death of magic. 
• Beauty travels to the future, where all humans live in underground bunkers.
• Beauty goes to high school and college in the 20th century.
• Beauty goes off to the realm of fairy, and ends up stuck in an imaginary realm on the way there. The realm ends up destroying itself, though Charon, the eternal boatman, escapes.
• Beauty assists Thomas the Rhymer with his escape from Fairy.
• Beauty uses a magical plant to cause her rapist to go blind.
• After returning from Fairy, Beauty helps her daughter, who is Cinderella.
• Beauty meets her granddaughter, Snow White.
• Beauty helps the Frog Prince, who was also in love with Rapunzel.
• Beauty spends a while in hell.
• The twelve archangels, plus Puck, Oberon, and the hosts of Fairy, go to war against Evil Incarnate.
• Beauty gathers up a few of every animal to create a life arc, a la Noah.

There are certainly some moments missing here - needless to say, there is a lot. When she first goes back, and we meet Ella of the Ashes (...Cinderella! Zing!) it felt clever By the third or fourth fairy tale incorporated, things felt a bit too self-indulgent. 

What I really need to talk about it Fidipur.

“You have no beer or wine?” I guessed. Only fools drank water. One could grow ill, drinking water.

“No wine. No beer. Nothing that takes food to make. The food must go directly to Fidipur.”

A god, I thought. Some kind of religious being? Perhaps an ogre or dragon that demanded sacrifice? Had I fallen among the heathen? Or were they Christians still? I felt it might be dangerous to ask that question.

“And you have no meat or milk?”

“That would take grain, also, which must go directly to Fidipur.” 

Who is Fidipur, who takes all?

Today I think I figured out Fidipur. In social studies class the teacher commented that the recent famines in Africa are only the beginning of what may turn out to be worldwide famines of varying degrees of severity. Then he showed us a film of black people in Africa dying in large numbers and another one about the hole in the Van Allen belts. (Father Raymond would be fascinated!) The teacher explained that very soon the world would warm up and get dryer, that food would be harder to produce, and “We won’ be able to fidipur, ‘cause there’ll be millyuns and millyuns of ‘em.”
Fidipur! Feed the poor. The way he said it was exactly the way the beggars in the twenty-first had said it. I asked Bill to explain it to me, and he told me about population growth and the Catholic church and acid rain and cutting down the rain forests to grow more food. Everyone argues about it, he said. Economists and businessmen say nothing is going wrong. Ecologists and population experts say the end is coming. While they argue, things keep changing until we get to the point of no return, sometime during the next hundred years. After that, there’ll be no more out-of-doors because every square inch of land will be needed to produce food, and that’s why, in the twenty-first, all the people had to be shut up in great tall, half-buried towers where they couldn’t move around and interfere with Fidipur’s farms.

The ultimate evil, then, is the initiative to feed the poor. It's more about the ecological damage that humans cause, and the way we take our planet for granted, but what a curveball! Don't feed them! It's hard to say if the lesson is to take better care of the planet or to care less for the poor... which is also an odd strategy for a book to take. 

This is a weird one. I admire the ambition, I salute the attempt, and I do not think the whole is a compelling enough package to be worth the time.

Perhaps be cautious if you meet anyone named Beauty or Charming, Stranger.
And don't forget to read a book!