Ammonite by Nicola Griffith

From The Week of May 09, 2010

Readers of this blog will remember my fondness for Ms. Griffith who won my heart with the indomitable Aud Torvingen. Though Ammonite has no such transformative character, and though it's plot teeters at times on the edge of a literary cliff, this her earliest novel, welds a frightening premise onto an inventive world to create a worthwhile if uneven effort.

In a future in which diseases still have the power to frighten, there is a planet colonized by humans which is sending ripples of fear throughout humanity. It has generated a virus which inevitably kills the men who step foot upon it. Though women are inexplicably spared death, they are changed, mentally plugged into the planet (Jeep) in a way that no one quite understands. Marghe, our heroine, an anthropologist by vocation and a lost soul by circumstance, is attempting both to study and cure the virus. But after descending from orbit to test out a new antidote, she is kidnapped, separated from the injections that keep her safe and infected with the very virus she was hoping to immunize the colonists from. Locked into hardship, Marghe soon surrenders to her intellectual curiosity and puts her time on Jeep to good use. After all, the human authorities may never allow her to rejoin her civilization now that she carries such a deadly pathogen. She will have to go native and learn what she can.

Though Ammonite is primarily propelled by Marghe, the novel's B plot follows the commander of Jeep's garrison. comprised of women forbidden to leave the world, conditions are difficult and tempers quixotic. For all the time spent on Jeep, they've kept themselves largely aloof from the colonists. But with Marguerite's disappearance and the up-tick in local tensions, that isolationism won't last.

While the plot holds up and the characters are interesting, it's the novelty of the virus and the extreme social dynamics it creates which animate this piece. Yes, this is a bit too obviously the product of a college daydream about what life would be like on a planet full of women, but the sociology saves it from veering off too far into crazy feminism land. Good work, but it's unable to avoid tropes of the genre. (3/5 Stars)