The Spirited Review - Singer from the Sea

Singer from the Sea by Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri Tepper's writing is dense, no doubt about it. Reading one of her novels is like immersing yourself in the depths of the ocean, hoping that you will remember to come up again before you too are transmogrified into a new benthic species. She is consistently able to weave together a number of very complex elements, reimagined on another world or in another time, and to do so in such a way that our own earth experience is illuminated. Her stories typically include threads of gender relations, class politics, religion, and the natural world. In Singer from the Sea, Tepper manages to bring each of these into an interwoven crescendo; in the finale, as the sea explodes upon the land, so also are human politics abruptly and thoroughly rearranged.

Tepper's premise in this story is that every planet has a worldspirit that is the fundamental root of life in that place, and further, that said spirit is a conscious one. (She even suggests that individuals possess no souls of their own, but instead are members of that larger worldspirit.) On Earth, human greed has destroyed the native life of the planet to such an extent that the Earthspirit instructs a group of people to build a ship to transport the Earthspirit together with her messenger and keystone species to another world. Once in space, the Earthspirit selects a home of her own choosing, crashes the ship in its ocean, and merges with the spirit of the new world, Haven.

Thousands of years later, Haven has been settled by a somewhat anti-technological human aristocracy that is thoroughly unaware of both the Earthhavenspirit and the human descendants of those who came to the planet as caretakers for the keystone species. The newer settlers are divided into three groups: on one continent, a nobility and a commons, on the other, a small city of secretive people. Members of the aristocracy on both continents have maintained a culture that pays lip service to tranquillity but underneath is riddled with a most evil expression of greed. For centuries this evil transpired in silence, but the worldspirit has interceded to create a lineage of people, one of whom will sing forth the sea and with that singing make judgment upon the people of the land. This woman will bring together the lives of the first people, the settlers, and new invaders, calling them all to account before the spirit of the world in order to preserve Haven from the fate of Earth.

Those who are acquainted with Gaia theory will recognize familiar elements in many of Tepper's writings. In Singer from the Sea she has created a reality where not only does each world have an operative consciousness, but that consciousness can choose whether to go or to stay. On worlds where the spirit has departed, all things slowly die, until the circle comes round again and a spirit returns to inhabit it. Tepper suggests that human beings -- that all individual beings -- cannot live without the presence of a great spirit.

Our teachers tell us that each world has a song that is begun with the first life on a world, a song that sounds within the world to foster life, and variation... Our teachers tell us that sometimes living creatures do not wish to be a part of the song; they do not hear it; they rise up against it; they cry that they are larger than the song and more important than the music, and when their words drown out the song, then the world begins to die. Within the song, we are an immortal resonance. Outside it, we are like the tinkle of a tiny bell, gone quickly into nothing.

Environmentalists, feminists and others will recognize the quandaries that the people of Haven face: When must we take action, and what actions are acceptable? How can we destroy an evil politic with the least harm to innocents? To what extent are we bound to humanity, to human culture, to the earth? What are the ultimate costs of silence? Tepper brings these questions to our awareness while managing to avoid a proscriptive voice, and does so in the context of a powerful, believable story that resonates long after the last page is read.

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