Julie's Reviews > The Book of Joan

In August 2015 I participated in a weekend writing workshop with Lidia Yuknavitch, an experience I chronicled here A Weekend with Lidia. At a reading the evening after our first day together, Lidia told the crowd she was working on a novel about Joan of Arc. Lidia + historical fiction didn't compute for me, but I'm willing to follow her anywhere, so I trusted her version of Joan's legend would be something quite apart from cloaks and swords and dastardly priests.

There were hints along the pre-release way that this wasn't another version of Joan set in the 15th century forests of Lancastrian France. Of course not. This is LIDIA. And this book is a core-shaking revolution of words. Tremblingly prescient, for it was written well before we knew what a dumpster fire of a political scene we were walking into, before demagoguery and willful ignorance would bring us to the edge of a precipice we are in desperate danger of plunging over.

In The Book of Joan the world has already plunged. It is 2049 and Earth is all but destroyed—ravaged and gutted by a multiplicity of wars over scarce resources. Those who could afford to fled the scene and created CIEL, a colony orbiting the space above their former planetary home. Corruption abhors a vacuum and into that space steps Jean de Men, a former television cult of personality turned sadistic cult leader, whose greatest achievement was the capture and public assassination of Joan, an Earthbound girlwarrior-ecoterrorist.

The Geocatastrophe that occurred in less than a generation's span forced shocking and irreversible physiological changes in the remaining human beings who live what remains of their existence on CIEL. This new species cannot procreate. But in their desperation to remain viable, they are destroying what little remains of life on earth, by sucking up its resources through Skylines and using children as fossil fuel.

There is little I can share with you about the book's plot without dancing with spoilers. A work of speculative fiction, it begins on CIEL in the same bewildering, bleak tradition as Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, with Christine as the doomed protagonist and her dearest Trinculo as resistor-martyr, but once the action falls to Earth and into Joan's story, it's grounding and full of love and warm muscle and heart and impossible to set aside. But the plot's not the point, anyway. It's what keeps the pages turning, and it's dazzling. Disorienting. Exasperating. Brilliant and wrenching.

As Lidia told us in that workshop nearly two years ago, The story is not about what happens. The story is why it matters. And there is so much here that matters, it's hard to understand how it's contained in 266 pages, by humble paper and ink. Art as resistance. Women as warriors (THE FUTURE IS FEMALE so many of us around the world chanted on January 21, 2017). The crushing power of fertility. The rape of Earth for profit. The blank slate of body, the only thing that truly belongs to us, this vulnerable, dying canvas of muscle and bone and skin, telling the story of the world. Love as the reason to act. Love for earth, for lovers, for children. Love for hope, love for art.

Lidia's prose is visceral and shocking and physical. She writes from the body as much as from the mind and the heart and you feel her words. As a reader I was stunned, horrified, aroused and broken.

Whatever your expectations of this book, lay them aside. Just read and embrace the power of what fiction can do to tell the truth of the world.