Uiziya e Lali and the nameless man known as nen-sasaïr live in a world where magic is real and one can change one’s sex. A cloth of transformation, woven from the wind, summons sand-birds of bright fire. They cocoon the summoner, who burns without burning before emerging as the desired sex. They attribute this ability to the goddess Bird – who gives the series of stories of which this novella is a part its overall name, the Birdverse – but from what we see in this book it might well be a symbiotic biological process that has evolved on this world.
Those who go through this are known as Changers, and are entirely physically transformed, to the extent of being able to bear children (if changing to female) or father them (if changing to male). While this seems ideal, unfortunately theirs is also a world where sexism persists. Nen-sasaïr’s people, the Khana, keep men and women entirely segregated, scholarly husbands and trader wives meeting only in special rooms for, ahem, “the rituals”.
And thus, a month after going through the process of becoming male, and less than a year after the death of his life partner, nen-sasaïr is no longer welcome among his female friends and fellow traders, while being formerly female counts against him with the men. What’s more, grandmothers get to spend time with their granddaughters, grandfathers do not. He’s not happy.
Uiziya is also a Changer, but she changed a long time ago, and her people, the Surun’, don’t really care about it anyway: changing your body to match your heart is not a thing to bleed your eyes over, as she puts it. She has her own problems: she wants to learn the last of the four profound weaves, the one woven from death and bones, and the only person who can teach it is Aunt Benesret – the outcast weaver who murdered Uiziya’s husband.
Nen-sasaïr agrees to come with, and thus they embark upon a quest, Uiziya on her magic carpet, woven of wanderlust, nen-sasaïr on his floating sand-skis, both of them in their sixties. With each chapter the first person narrative switches between the two of them, so the reader must stay alert, especially since their voices are not easily distinguishable and they are often in the same location.
The book’s greatest strength is its exploration of what changing has meant for nen-sasaïr. We see the sacrifice he made in staying female for so long, to preserve a relationship with a partner who would not have accepted a male partner, and, less sympathetically, his bitterness about her forty-year refusal, and how that pressure burdened her. Is the message that love can conquer all, since they stayed together so long, or that sometimes it isn’t enough? Probably the latter, since neither of them seems to have been happy. It’s a heartbreaking depiction of people in an impossible situation.
What’s missing from the book is any exploration of how the ability to change sex so easily and effectively would affect a population, what it would mean for society. Here on Earth, the advent of sex-selective abortion, legal or not, has exacerbated imbalances in some countries: there are forty-nine million more men than women in India. Such large concentrations of unhappy, unattached young men in one place can have varied and destabilizing consequences.
But in this book there is no sign of an imbalance in the sex ratio, and there is evidence that the current social order has been stable for a long time. It’s hard to understand why, when we see that women there face horrendous oppression on the basis of their sex, such as being forcibly stripped of their magic in the city of Iyar (and worse if they resist), or not being permitted to work as artificers (except in secret) among the Khana.
But it’s a short book, and it’s in the first person; it’s not unreasonable for it to stick to a narrow point of view, and perhaps such wider issues were addressed in earlier stories.
Kate Elliott loved it, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for preferring her opinion, but for me it was a decent book without being outstanding. The writing was a bit repetitive, and it’s hard to sympathise with a pair of lead characters who throw themselves into such terribly dangerous endeavours without a pressing reason to do so. They know from past encounters how treacherous their adversaries are, yet arrive without a plan every time.
Despite that, one has to root for them against such fiends, and the book concludes well, with a promise of more drama and adventure. Stephen Theaker ***
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