Hi I’m Liv and welcome back to the Waterstones vlog. Today I'm going to talk to you about
a book that I think it is very special and really important and one that I think a lot
of people will love and that is Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book Of Joan. Now I had an early reading
copy of this so what I'm going to do is superimpose the cover just here while I talk about it.
So Lidia Yuknavitch is an American writer who has developed a bit of a cult following
in the US but hasn't been published in the UK before. Canoncate are publishing her novel
The Book Of Joan and at some point in the future I believe will be publishing her memoir
The Chronology Of Water which is one that particularly sparked her cult following in America.
So The Book Of Joan is essentially a futuristic post-apocalyptic retelling of Joan of Arc
and what Lidia Yuknavitch does is she uses this story to say something about our relationship
with the planet and the relationship between men and women and gender.
It is fiercely feminist, fiercely intelligent - unabashedly so - it's raw, it's vital, it's
bubbling and bristling, full of energy and it is absolutely fantastic. It posits Joan
as a young girl who discovers she has these gifts where she can communicate and interact
with nature and the Natural World in a way not seen before.
The book charts the disintegration of our planet both in terms of the environment and
our relationship with the planet and this war that breaks out after the rise of a populist
former reality TV star Jean De Men who becomes this figurehead of society - the richest of
society - who end up building an off-world satellite station where all the richest of
society go to live, and it merges these two strands together which forms the main thrust
of the sci-fi strand of the book which is that the disintegration of our planet and
solar flares and all of the devastation that has occured to the planet have lead to infertility,
erosion of gender - in terms of quite literally genitalia is no more; there is no man, there
is no woman, people can't have sex anymore it's this sterile sort of environment now,
the planet, which is part of the reason why these richest society end up going off world
to survive. But it’s unclear what they’re sort of surviving because there's no reproduction
it's just these rich people in society and there is a finite lifespan that they have
and they are plundering Earth’s final resources in order to power this off world home station
As well as our off world main characters in Christine and Trinculo who are trying to subvert
the order of things up there and go against the established story of Joan of Arc and the
truth of that, you also get to meet the last few remaining inhabitants of earth and see
how they're doing down there. I won't spoil the plot in terms of who you meet where but
it's all very good.
The other really intriguing thread in this book is the importance of literature and storytelling,
and the power of stories, and truth in stories. So in this world there are these things called
skin grafts which is essentially kind of tattooing and also skin stretching and it's used as
a way of telling stories but it’s also a mark of status - there are a lot of descriptions
of some of the higher status people having these folds of skin grafts coming down from
their faces in great waves to sort of replicate hair.
One of the main characters Christine is an expert in skin grafting and she has chosen
to use her own body as a canvas for the story of Joan of Arc and that's her way of telling
the true story of Joan of Arc and then other people become involved in that as well.
And it's a very important part of the story, this notion of storytelling - who gets to
tell stories, who gets to tell the truth; the notion that history is always written
by the victor comes up and how we play with that and what really is the truth of - in
this case - the story of Joan of Arc, how is that twisted, how is that disseminated
amongst people and what becomes of that; how does that become a legend or a myth as opposed
to the reality being stamped out by some tyrannical overseer.
So like many futuristic post-apocalyptic novels it is very timely and very of the present
- it deals with fake truths and the notion of ownership over truth, it deals with gender,
how we see gender, how we interact with gender, how we feel gender, and it deals with our
relationship with the natural world and how we should be careful, what control we do have,
what control we don't have
Where it starts to veer off into the more sci-fi elements I think maybe die-hard sci-fi
fans will take umbrage possibly with the world building in it, but you know what for me that
is part of its charm and part of its point really is that this future is messy, it's
chaotic, there are answers that we don't know and that we can't possibly know because of
the things that we have done to the world and to society.
In a way for me it's kind of a ‘the message is the medium and the medium is the message’
type idea going on with The Book Of Joan and it's more sort of high concept sci-fi things
where the chaos has been wrought on this world means that the science is in flux and so the
futuristic elements aren’t the main thrust of it, that's not the main point of the story,
it's about storytelling it's about what we do to the planet and it's about what we do
to each other
As I say it is unabashedly intelligent, it is raw, it is vital, it is radical, it is
messy yet beautiful - the prose itself is some of the most astonishing I've ever read,
particularly when Lidia Yuknavitch is taking characters and making them talk about storytelling
and truth - it is just exquisite prose that you will just devour.
There is of course an easy parallel to draw with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale,
and I think if you've read The Handmaid’s Tale - if you haven't you may be one of very
few and I urge you to go and read that one very soon - but if you have read The Handmaid's
Tale there will be some similarities but this is much more sort of sci-fi futuristic, but
don't let that put you off if you're not a sci-fi reader because the thrust of this book
is this fiercely feminist, natural-world power struggle that is just so beautifully wrought
that you will just absolutely love it
I for one am very excited to read more of Lidia Yuknavitch’s work I can't wait until
Canongate publish The Chronology Of Water, and I hope that Canongate will continue publish
some more of her novels in the future
So The Book Of Joan is a novel that raises so many questions about gender fluidity, our
relationship with Earth and power, truth, storytelling. It is utterly bonkers, utterly
beautiful, utterly brilliant. and in the words of Rebecca Solnit in one of the reviews “buckle
your seatbelts, you’re in for a wildly feminist ride.”