Bear Daughter by Judith Berman
book
My life is full of minor mysteries like why my hair falls out so fast, why food seems to be losing the rich flavours I recall from my youth, and why I buy books like Bear Daughter. I checked back in my records and I did indeed order this about six months ago but, as senility creeps ever closer to my mental door, I cannot begin to explain what must have been in my mind at the time. Anyway, this book reminded me of Project Habakkuk which, I am ashamed to say, was a plan hatched by the British during WWII. Essentially, the “powers that be” proposed restructuring an iceberg as an aircraft carrier. It’s a kind of reverse Titanic. British planes would fly out to this floating landing strip, load up with bombs, and then attack German U-Boats in the middle of the ocean where they thought they were safe on the surface. We Brits made prototypes that were towed up and down the Canadian and North American coast. Practical tests showed them unsinkable by naval guns and torpedos. Even the problem of melting in warmer water was solved by adding tons of wood pulp into the ice.
Well, Bear Daughter sounds like an equally boffo idea. One night, a twelve-year-old bear cub goes to sleep and wakes up a little girl. It’s all in the genes as her daddy of unknown origins had taken her human mummy away with him and impregnated her. The result is one of these immortals-half-full stories as our ingénue struggles to understand this unexpected transformation and reconcile the two parts of her inheritance.
Judith Berman has the misfortune to be an expert linguistic anthropologist, specialising in North American languages and myths. The book is therefore liberally larded with detail about life among an Inuit-type people, demonstrating how myths and magic percolate through their lives. If it’s in any sense to be taken as realistic, we must see it as set in the past where tribes preyed upon each other, killing the strong and taking the others as slaves. If this is a separate fantasy world, the summer lands are ruled by great brown bears and the seas by orca. The humans must therefore move carefully to avoid upsetting the relevant supernatural entities who sacrifice themselves as food from the seas and the lands. Shamans work within a framework of animism and talk with the spirits living within each animal. They aim to show respect, even during a hunt, and hope to maintain a balance between the human and spirit worlds. If harmony is lost, the consequences can be severe.
Well, Ms Berman takes her idea and launches it into the icy waters of the coast where everyone with a gun or torpedo tries to sink our waif as she runs from pillar to post (a challenge when spending so much time in a canoe) trying to summon up enough courage to accept she is able to talk to spirits and get things done. Incredibly, no matter how much explosives people pack into the warheads aimed at her, she just picks herself up, dusts herself down, and keeps on running or paddling in desperate search of who she is. After a while, it grows monotonous. Instead of having a little curiosity or gumption, she remains stubbornly resistant to the notion she could beat the various factions trying to kidnap or kill her. In the end, I gave up trying to work out who everyone is. They all blur together as a generic threat. Even when she accidentally falls in with the orcas and meets the Bright People, she remains paranoid and insecure. At every point, I found her attitude annoying.
Then, just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it does. This insufferably stubborn brat finds herself pregnant (although how this is achieved is left to our imagination) and, before you can say “Jack Robinson”, she’s had a quick dash as a killing machine and become a mother. Despite this unexpected delivery, she remains in perverse rejection of everything she could be, whether bear, girl, mother or something in-between. I suppose, by now, we should be used to this denial. As any alcoholic will tell you, denial is the biggest single barrier to recovery. What should we think of this cub? That she has the willpower and moral fibre of a beast unable to fight its way out of a soggy paper bag, or that she can recover if only she comes to terms with her essential nature.
Ah well, Ms Berman has the answer. All we have to do to pull this girl out of her funk is send her on another quest. This time, she will gather the bones of her father and brothers and, in backbreaking pilgrimage through the home she had known as a child to the place where reincarnation becomes possible, she will finally reach peace with herself. Then, all that remains is to beat the evil wizard and accept the one she loves — it is, after all, a romantic fantasy.
I suppose I could get out the thesaurus and start with tedious but, like the book, the task would immediately become repetitively boring. Just like Project Habakkuk, this book was doomed before it set sail. You can understand why it has been her only novel. What is more difficult to understand is how it came to be published at all. You should avoid it at all costs unless you like your fantasy weighed down with extensively researched details of North American myths.
Bear Daughter by Judith Berman
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
The phrase that comes to mind is, “ghastly beyond belief”. Even the girl on the cover looks as sick as a parrot. It’s rare for me to find a book so awful. Perhaps it’s my time of the month.
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Thinking about books 