The Doloriad - Question 2 - Power in a Dying World

kcaryths

The Matriarch maintains complete power in a world that appears to have competely died. Does this book have anything to say about power and authority, or how and why it is maintained, even in situations where what is being ruled over seemingly is in its end stages of existence? What about when that power begins to crumble as the book goes on?

RichardAbbott

Here I wish we'd been told a bit more about the world. Were there other groups or not? Why the prevalent deformities? What had happened? How had the Matriarch first come into her power? I felt constantly cut off from anything that might tell me more about the world - presumably a deliberate authorial ploy to instil in the reader similar feelings to the characters, but I found it frustrating rather than illuminating.

Apocryphal

I think it was saying that political power is conferred, and once the people stop conferring that power, it evaporates. It's also about generational change. It seemed obvious to me how the matriarch came to power - she gave birth to it and held it by force of personality. But, you know, (grand)kids grow up and have different ideas. I'm not sure the ending was all that well executed to make this reading of it clear, but that's what I got out of it.

kcaryths

Yeah, the question as to whether there were actually other groups didn't seem to be one that Williams seemed too interested in actually answering, but rather it was a plot device to drive the narrative along. The deformities were just from the incestuous relationships of the family and the matriarch was trying to hold everything together with some last attempt to keep humanity alive.

I can't understand why anyone would feel motivated to maintain power in a situation like this, though perhaps if they felt that it was the only way they could possibly keep the human experiment moving (in whatever direction it was moving - certainly didn't seem forward) then they might do it. The "uncle" certainly didn't seem to care much whether anyone lived or died.

RichardAbbott

@kcaryths said:
Yeah, the question as to whether there were actually other groups didn't seem to be one that Williams seemed too interested in actually answering, but rather it was a plot device to drive the narrative along. The deformities were just from the incestuous relationships of the family and the matriarch was trying to hold everything together with some last attempt to keep humanity alive.

This kind of highlights some of my perplexity about the story. We first meet Dolores being wheeled off to some other group, presumably as a bride as part of some kind of peace treaty. But then she gets dumped in the middle of nowhere, manages to make her way back (in ways that not even her own family can comprehend) and then kind of drifts around aimlessly. Nobody seems very bothered about whether the other party to the treaty even exists.

Yes, I got that the deformities derived from incest, but they seemed way too severe and too rapid to be coherent. If most of the children / grandchildren had lost legs, it kind of defies my understanding how they were surviving at all in that environment. The patch of land being farmed was too small and too erratically managed to actually generate much food, and the group as a whole didn't seem to indulge in foraging old supermarkets or some such.

Whatever the apocalypse was (and I don't think the details matter) it was, I think, in the lifetime of the Matriarch and her generation. I'm no biologist but I can't believe that deformities progress from incest at that speed. It would make more sense to me if they were attributed to fallout or biological warfare or the like, rather than inbreeding.

I can't understand why anyone would feel motivated to maintain power in a situation like this, though perhaps if they felt that it was the only way they could possibly keep the human experiment moving (in whatever direction it was moving - certainly didn't seem forward) then they might do it. The "uncle" certainly didn't seem to care much whether anyone lived or died.

Yes, agreed. All in all, I couldn't make any coherent sense of the world that was being portrayed.

Apocryphal

That’s true - I had the impression that both the matriarch and the schoolmaster remembered things from before the catastrophe, which means we have only one or two inbred generations. I don’t think that could explain the lack of limbs. But I also don’t think the reason for the lack of limbs is all that important - does it matter if it was malnutrition, inbreeding, radiation, or flesh-eating disease? The plot doesn’t hinge on this, anyway.

RichardAbbott

@Apocryphal said:
... the lack of limbs. But I also don’t think the reason for the lack of limbs is all that important - does it matter if it was malnutrition, inbreeding, radiation, or flesh-eating disease? The plot doesn’t hinge on this, anyway.

I agree that the cause of the lack of limbs is secondary, but the fact of it meant that most members of the group couldn't go very far to explore, forage, make contact with others etc. Those limitations surely were central, and the nerdy part of me wanted there to be some kind of rationale for this.