March 2008

The Bone Whistle by Eva Swan
Juno Books (2007), ISBN 0809557924
Reviewed by J. G. Stinson

J.G. Stinson has been reading SF, fantasy and horror fiction for over 35 years. Strange Horizons, The New York Review of Science Fiction and the Internet Review of Science Fiction (among others) have published her reviews and essays, and she was a contributor to The Cherryh Odyssey (edited by Edward Carmien, Wildside Press, 2004), an author study of C. J. Cherryh.

Romance, as a genre, involves the story of a relationship between two people (male and female, nearly always) in which the ending finds them together as a couple. The best example of this that I've read is Katherine [1] , a historical romance novel quite removed from the negatively termed "bodice-ripper" paperback novel that has been immensely popular since at least the 1980s. Katherine has a lot less sex and more extensive character development than a categorical Romance novel, which tends to provide minute details about the romantic pair but not much dimension for secondary characters.

In the last decade or so, certain publishing categories have undergone a melding which has produced an interesting addition to science fiction overall. Romance (as Juno Books editor Paula Guran notes it [2]) has expanded into the fantastic—or maybe it's the other way around. We now have science fiction, fantasy and even horror fiction with adult, complicated, intimate relationships as a major feature, but the "happily ever after" mainstay of Romance is more often absent than present. The Romance Writers of America has accepted this shift, most notably in its nomination categories for their annual awards (the Ritas). They would have been fools not to, as these books apparently sell quite well.

But are they worth reading? Is someone who claims to be any form of feminist going to enjoy them?

When they're done well, yes, to answer both questions.

The Bone Whistle primarily focuses on Darly, 20 years young and chafing at her mother Vivian's insistence that she continue to accompany her on their annual summer trek from the Denver outskirts to the Greenview, South Dakota, reservation cabins where Vivian was raised. Vivian, a single mom who's just lost her main job, sees Greenview as the wellspring from which she renews herself; to Darly, it's a pointless exercise in trying to hold onto the past. The only good thing about the trip for Darly is seeing Jake, her grandfather.

Envisioning two months of jaw-cracking boredom, Darly complains to her grandfather that Greenview is useless to her: "It's time for me to get on with my life, you know." Jake decides to pass on a small item to his granddaughter that his relative, Her Road, gave him decades ago: a bone whistle. Experienced fantasy readers might guess that this whistle has certain properties, and they'd be right.

Darly takes a walk one afternoon and chances upon a rattlesnake sunning itself on a rock; she comes too close before noticing it to safely escape it. The snake's rattling tail-end announces its potential lethality, and without much thought, Darly slips the bone whistle from her pocket and blows into it. The man who appears from behind her shortly afterward is able to send the snake away, and thus begins Darly's journey into finding out who she really is, and why her mother is still so attached to Greenview and her past there.

Helping her on her search is Osni, a traditionalist wanaghi who finds his thoughts progressively more consumed with thoughts of Darly, in customary Romance fashion. Darly isn't immune to his charms, either, and the romance that develops between them is endearing without being saccharine, and logical since Darly had recently broken up with another man. Darly's entry into his life causes Osni to seriously reconsider his beliefs regarding access to the human world, and with that questioning, he moves from cardboard romantic interest into a full-fledged "real" being.

"Eva Swan" (a pseudonym for a writer of Native American ancestry currently living in England, according to the biographical information at the Juno Books Web site) has apparently taken some Lakota Sioux beliefs about souls and ghosts and melded them with the Celtic legends of the Sidhe, the faerie folk from under the hills. "Wanagi" (or wanaghi, as Swan uses it) is a Sioux word for ghost or soul, which they believed left the body at death but stayed nearby for four days, potentially causing trouble unless propitiated with offers of food and drink. [3] Woven through the novel are touches of other indigenous traditions and beliefs, such as the Ghost Keeping Ceremony and the Ghost Dance. [4] With them, Swan creates a history of how some Sioux, having separated themselves from their families when Europeans came, found gateways in caves that led to a world where they could maintain their customs without taint from invaders.

But they never closed the gateways. Some of them traveled back to their original homeland, and stayed long enough to create new life before, in most cases, slipping back to their home under the hills.

Darly's father is a wanaghi. Her grandmother, Mae, was also wanaghi, but one who stayed longer than most in the human world because she loved Jake so much, though she took their son to her underhill home to be raised in wanaghi traditions. Those traditions become the source of a conflict between two factions in the wanaghi world. Some believe the gateways to the human world should remain open; others are opposed—violently so—to this belief, and are closing the gateways, one by one.

The bone whistle is the bridge between Darly's world and the world of her paternal family, and its traditional use and meaning symbolize the novel's events as well. Whistling sounds often heralded the presence of a spirit messenger [5]; in many tribes, flute-playing was reserved for courting, and a warrior's ability in flute playing was the measure of his success in luring a woman to his side. [6] Several of the symbolic aspects of whistles and ghosts are used in this novel, and the explanations for them are smoothly laid into the text. The wanaghi also have magical powers, but not the all-powerful-wizard kind; they can be injured, sometimes severely.

Given the author's anonymity, readers can't know whether this is Swan's first novel, but it certainly could be. The hopping between character viewpoints, often from one paragraph to the next, feels like the work of an inexperienced writer and may be irritating to readers unused to such changes. However, it does allow the reader access to all the characters' thoughts, necessary to seeing the full scope of their lives and how those lives change. The "anti-gateway" wanaghi's use of dynamite found in an abandoned human mine is questionable, given that the wanaghi had been emphasized as strict traditionalists. Beyond its convenience, using a non-traditional weapon to close the gateways knocks suspension of disbelief on its side, and makes Swan's use of it too easy a solution. These are the kinds of flaws common to a first novel. They may not completely be Swan's fault, though; to hop on an old hobbyhorse of mine, a competent copy editor should have caught these things and at least questioned the author about them.

The Bone Whistle is, ultimately, about love. It examines three main relationships: those of humans to each other, of humans to those not quite human, and of humans to their environment. The ties between humans and wanaghi in this novel are those of love and honor, two things that mean a great deal in many cultures, though they're often expressed differently. Jake and Mae had a long-lasting, deeply committed relationship, while Vivian and Taté (Darly's parents) had a brief but intense affair. Darly's decision on her feelings for Osni is her own to make, and it's no surprise, given what she's seen of the relationships in her family.

Swan's skills in characterization and narrative are solid but slightly rough; whether by intent or inexperience is hard to determine. One wishes that the infamous slips between galley proofs and final printing were nonexistent, as they always detract from the reading experience. Overall, however, this is a novel that has a unique perspective on Faerie and on Native American legends, and combining them brings this story a refreshing setting for readers jaded by the flood of western European medieval fantasy novels. The author's ancestry also sidesteps the cultural appropriation question, a topic of heated discussion in some circles in recent years.

But what keeps a reader in the book are the characters and the setting; we can see ourselves in Swan's people, and the world created in the novel is at least different enough to draw readers along, just to see what the author does with it. One hopes to see more and improved work from this writer, if for no other reason than to know what else might come from Swan's obviously fertile imagination.

Notes

1. Katherine by Anya Seton, Houghton Mifflin, Boston: 1954.

2. "Introduction: What Is 'Paranormal Romance'?" by Paula Guran. Best New Paranormal Romance, Juno Books, August 2006. [PDF]

3. "Part Nine: Something Whistling in the Night: Ghosts and the Spirit World," American Indian Myths and Legends, selected and edited by Richerd Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, Pantheon Books, New York: 1984, introduction, p. 429.

4. Word Dance: The Language of Native American Culture by Carl Waldman. Facts on File Books, New York: 1994. p. 85. The entry on the Ghost Keeping Ceremony (Wanagi yuhapi) reads, "The rituals surrounding the Sioux (Lakota) custom of a family's keeping the soul of a deceased person in a symbolic ghost bundle for as much as a year. After ritual purification has been completed, the soul is released to the Spirit World." The Ghost Dance from the 1870s came from the Paiute prophet Wodziwob, and the Ghost Dance Religion grew out of earlier Ghost Dance traditions and also began with a Paiute prophet, Wovoka, in 1889. Wovoka's spiritual movement was an end-times spiritual movement, predicting that the "world would soon end, then come alive again. Indians, including the dead from past ages, would inherit a regenerated earth filled with lush prairie grasses and herds of buffalo." Most Ghost Dance traditions called for a return to pre-European contact customs and ways of life in order to earn this new world, and "honored the native dead while predicting their resurrection."

5. Erdoes and Ortiz, 1984, p. 429.

6. Ibid, p. 273. "In many tribes, the flute was an instrument used only for courting. Its sound was said to resemble the call of the elk, whose powerful medicine made a man irresistible...There are also tales of men whose flutes and melodies had such power that any woman who heard them would follow the sound and surrender herself to the player."