Voices of Hope

David Feintuch

New York: Warner, 1996. ISBN: 0-446-60333-3. Pp. 527

I have to admit that despite my admiration for the first four entries in the Seafort Saga, I opened this one with some trepidation. For one, the narrative is split among several different characters who describe the events from the various viewpoints. This sort of thing is incredibly difficult to pull off with any lasting conviction, and so it was a gamble. Second, none of these characters is Nick. In all truth, a lot of the attraction of the first novels came from his sharing his perspective, his motivations, and his suffering from the choices he had to make. There would be none of this here, for even though Nick is important, he is neither the central protagonist, at least not until the very end, nor is he the locus of events.

Imagine my delight when by page 10 I discovered that it was impossible to put down this book. Feintuch delivers an utterly believable smorgasbord of perspectives, each of which is intensely personal, and each of which can not only be distinguished by the character's speech peculiarities but by the type of things they pay attention to, the type of reactions they have internally, and the type of external facade they project to others. There are: Philip Tyre Seafort (Nick and Arlene's precocious teenage son), his friend, the troubled Jared (Adam Tenere's son), the weak and guilt-tripping Robert Boland (the Senator's son, now a politician in his own right), the wild Pook (a trannie from Midtown Manhattan), and the "traytaman" Pedro Chang. Feintuch appears to have spent considerable time coming up with mannerisms for each of these people along with personal slang to make them even more memorable (and a lot easier to distinguish).

Most of the action takes places in New York, in particular the streets of the city that are now essentially out of the government's control. Violent transpops rule the various sections of the city, fragmented in various tribes, quarrelsome, poor, but somehow managing to survive. But the government is on the move, attempting to reclaim the bowels of the city, clean them up, and build more towers for the Uppies, the rich upper classes of this society. As a first step in that plan, they turn off the water supply to the non-voting trannies, hoping that this will make it easier to push them out, probably to resettlement on other planets. (This, by the way, was tried already before and it did not seem to work all that well.)

Nick, now retired former Secretary General of the United Nations world government, is aloof in his compound in Washington. Despite essentially having failed in his responsibility to the trannies during his tenure as the most powerful politician on Earth, he seems to have resigned himself to a life of quiet guilt-ridden existence, his only solace in his son P.T. and wife Arlene. His astounding ability to blame himself for everything and find fault with whatever world-saving action he takes forces him to stay out of the fray, even when Chang comes asking for his help in intervening on trannies' behalf with the government. But his self-imposed exile is not going to last long. When young, and totally out of control, Jared flees home in a fit of adolescent pique (and perhaps some sexual confusion), P.T. (who seems to have inherited Nick's boundless capacity for guilt-tripping) takes off after him, and they both end up in the streets of New York City. Naturally, Nick and Arlene will go looking for their son, just like Nick did when Annie had disappeared there a long time ago.

The novel then follows Jared, P.T., Chang, and Pook in their separate but quickly converging stories, with Robert's occasional interjection to give us an idea of what Nick is doing. Pook reminds me a lot of Eddie Boss, with all that endearing vulnerability under the gruff exterior. Unlike Eddie, however, he gets himself trounced quite often, which does not seem to lessen his bravado. P.T. is a neurotic genius who plays the role of a thirteen-year old very well even while analyzing the adults and the world around him in very grown-up ways. Chang is, well, the Chang we've already met. Jared is one of those people it takes a Christ to love. However, his knowledge of computers and his connections in the hacker underworld will bring him within inches of wreaking total chaos on the orderly world of the U.N. theocracy.

The story is a struggle. The have-nots, the voiceless unrepresented trannies who want to survive, perhaps even keep their ways of life no matter how uncivilized they appear to the Uppies, are pitched against the wealthier voting citizens who cannot be bothered to learn enough about the poor to care about them. No wonder that the politicians find it easy to wage "war on poverty" in a very non-LBJ sort of way. While the trannies remain faceless disorganized masses, they have no hope, even if the Fisherman himself intervenes. But Feintuch is an optimist: he believes that the problem is not that citizens do not care about the poor, the problem is that they do not know them. If they did, the decent folk will doubtless prevent the politicians from pushing the trannies around.

But despite his essential optimism, Feintuch is realist enough to realize that while the trannies remain fragmented, they will be easy pickings for the monumental government machine. So easy, in fact, that they can be shoved aside with nary a murmur that would register with the voters. So what the trannies must do is organize and present a united front that can raise enough ruckus to force people to stand up and notice them. Unfortunately, given the energetic actions of the government, this will not involve peaceful marches and dignified speeches but an outright revolt, stunning violence, and cyberfighting, the one type of attack the government cannot easily counter with helicopters and troops. The costs are appalling, the trannies die in defiance by the thousands... and nobody seems to notice.

Nobody, that is, until Nick Seafort finally realizes that for once, his guilt-tripping is actually warranted. He has let the poor down, and he now must rectify this, even if it costs him his own life and the life of his son. Nick, being Nick, is quite consistent in the abrupt switch from doting affection for P.T. to the stern decision to let him die for a larger cause. Arlene, on the other hand, was a bit too much for me to handle in the sense that she was too overwrought for the trained soldier that she is, and too quick to agree to the slaughter of thousands just to give P.T. a chance to survive. For all its moral claims to superiority based on its religious foundations, the U.N. government shows itself quite capable of atrocities that no modern democracy would be able to stomach. (Here Feintuch seems to go a bit overboard, actually. On one hand, the overriding desire for law and order arising from the Rebellious Ages seems to justify the harsh actions SecGen Kahn takes, but on the other the Church cannot have condoned the mass murder these actions produced. The U.N. being what it is in Feintuch's world appears to involve some serious contradictions. But this is just a quibble; I do realize that to make Nick's shuttle stunt work dramatically it was necessary to pitch him against the entire regime.)

Truly a treat, this novel shows Feintuch's evolution as a story-teller. Despite the profusion of viewpoints, the narrative is easy to follow and Pook's tranniespeak is pure delight to read (for fun, let someone who has not been immersed in it try reading it... it's entertaining to see the results). Having said all that, I really did miss Nick and I hope that the next entries in the Seafort Saga return to him.

June 8, 2006