Some Thoughts on Walking to Mercury, by Starhawk

Walking to Mercury by Starhawk

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I'm a big Starhawk fan. I can't tell you how many times I have read her cri de coeur utopian novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing. I have taught it a few times in a my first-year seminar on utopia. Yes, it has a Message--several actually--it is a rhetorical novel. But, then, I would argue that is inherent in utopian fiction.

Readers will find the same Messages, more or less, in Walking to Mercury, which is the prequel to The Fifth Sacred Thing and the "story of Maya Greenwood," the "ninety-eight-year-old writer and rebel" who is one of the main characters in Fifth. We find here the "compelling story of the forces that shaped that extraordinary woman" (front cover). Yes, at times, these Messages are a bit heavy-handed. More than once, I wanted to say to someone that I get it, I really get it: the Earth is our mother, respect her, love her, save her, the patriarchy has bled the planet and crippled humankind, power corrupts.... I could go on. But so it is with any polemical fiction. The question here is does the story survive, does it come first? Is the story overpowered by its Messages? Are the characters real human beings, with all our flaws, ambiguities, and contradictions, or are they authorial mouthpieces?

The answer here is yes, sometimes. But, Starhawk has a good story of how Maya came to be who she is--Witch, feminist, activist, rebel, and lover, friend--an "extraordinary" yet very human woman. Maya is on a pilgrimage to Nepal, to find her sister, Debby, who is a doctor in a "remote mountain clinic" in Nepal. Maya carries with her their mother's ashes. She wants to heal their "fractured family bonds" and come to terms with her past.

But, this is a story about the weight of the past and its presence in the present. As Maya climbs the mountains in Nepal, she finds herself on another journey, this time into the past, into her relationship with her mother, Debby. with Johanna, "her soul sister, her mirror, her lover," and Rio, the wild boy Maya found and loved after running away from home at 17.

Maya is no saint and neither are those whom she loves. That she is human let me past the sometimes overwrought rhetoric. Rio has alcohol-fueled demons that may cause his demise. Maya and her sister find it hard to make peace. Johanna has a "fierce commitment to her African foremothers." And there are secrets, heavy with memory and pain.

This was a good read, a page turner.



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