Piers Anthony - Being A Green Mother

I've never liked juggling books because it takes the longest time to finish a single text, especially when you are an an idiosyncratic reader like me who scans well-written sentences over and over again to relish their glorious syntax. At the same time I can't help it, I am overcome with an insuppressible desire to know what the other book contains. There are problems for book jugglers, though. Having to remember where we left off, recapping the chronology of events, and sometimes even flipping back to check which character is which (if you've been on a hiatus long enough to warrant this) completely ruins the continuity and sometimes makes reading difficult to enjoy. It is unavoidable, I suppose. Some books we leave on the shelf after the first chapter and completely forget about them. Some books we find an extraordinary power to complete if it's the last thing we do - but it's not always worth the trouble.

Such as this. The last couple of days, I've been reading Piers Anthony's Being A Green Mother. I've got the whole series on loan from my friend and thought what a great idea it would be to complete another fantasy series after years. That's a great sense of accomplishment right there. But it struck me as odd that the book didn't seem to want to finish. Could it be - supernatural? Even when I was 80 pages from the end, it kept going on and on and on. That's when I realized I was reading at a snail's pace, purely for the sake of finishing it, because it was quite terrible compared to his other novels in the series. This one was pure lackluster - and it wasn't because of the idea, which was good, but rather the way Anthony chose to flesh it out that didn't resound with me.

Being A Green Mother is the story of the human who takes over the office of the Nature. Orb, our Irish protagonist, dances and sings in her search for the most powerful but elusive song, the Llano. She first joins a gypsy carnival group in India, and later travels the world with her band, made up of 3 junkies, one black girl and one succubus, inside a giant flying fish.

Dear Mr. Anthony (I want to ask him),

Where did the genius of On A Pale Horse and Bearing An Hourglass go to? In the former, you deftly tackled the morbidity of death with an admirable clear-headedness. You crafted the mysterious, intelligent, compassionate Thanatos from an irritating, self-destructive Zane. The ideas were crisp and sharp, you gave insightful, sensitive answers to the question of mortality. However, that character development and insight is completely lost in Green Mother: Orb remains the same, hesitating woman with a determined, uncompromising goal: to find the Llano, wherever it is. Her magic grows, no doubt, but she doesn't. Her righteous morality keeps getting into the way when she meets new characters, and she resolves her issues by choosing not confront them. With Bearing An Hourglass, you demonstrated your power over the language - which I fail to see in Green Mother. Orb's personality is strictly limited to dancing the tanana (the provocative gypsy dance meant to incite erotic response - great idea, by the way) or singing on her harp. When reading this, one gets the feeling that you wrote purely for the sake of it. The adjectives got overused after a while; the idea of affecting nature with song - at first interesting - soon lost its novelty. As did the entire book.

Best,
Preet

I wrote a few thoughts last month on another book in Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series, which you can read here.