Exile's song Book

This may be the point where the lack of consistency in Darkover's portrayal across the books finally gets to me.

The plot of Exile's Song is the classic "outsider comes to isolated culture and suffers misunderstandings" setup, except Margaret "Marguerida" Alton was born on Darkover, is the daughter of Lew Alton and Thyra Kadarin after the events of The Heritage of Hastur, but has been living in the Terran Empire"Federation" for most of her life. She ignored her father and went to University (capitalization in original) to study music, and comes to Darkover to collect folk songs because her advisor has a grant. Her advisor dies, she learns she's actually planetary nobility, and the events of the novel happen.

The major problem of the first 250 pages is that this is one of those books where if you held guns to the heads of the protagonists and ordered them to talk to each other, you could condense those 250 pages into maybe 30. There's an enormous amount of dancing around the fact that yes, she's Lew Alton's daughter and the rightful heir to the Alton Domain, yes, she has laran, and yes, she has the Alton Gift. Gabriel and Javanne Lanart scheme for close to 150 pages to marry her off before Margaret realizes that maybe the Terrans would notice one of the citizens vanishing on a backwater world and invokes civis romanus sum on them. Sure, people do this all the time in real life, but that doesn't make it any less annoying to read about.

That's not the biggest complaint I have about Exile's Song. The biggest complaint is that my main interest in fiction is worldbuilding and this book makes it impossible to determine anything about anything. Previous books always called it the Terran Empire and implied it was humanity spreading out from Earth to the stars, but here it's the Federation and there are worlds with humans who aren't Terrans. Are they other lost ships? But Rediscovery implied that the lost ships were incredibly rare and there were only a few of them at the very beginning of human spaceflight, so there's no way the majority of planets in the Federation could be that way. Was there some kind of war in the past and the Terrans are reuniting long-sundered planets? Where do these planets with primitive societies come from? When Margaret talks about living on a hot planet and wearing feathers, was she studying nonhumans? I need to understand the system Margaret comes from because that informs her background and this just leaves me with more questions than ever.

In Sharra's Exile, we learn that there are telepaths on other worlds, but here Margaret half-believes that laran is a myth. Are there psychics elsewhere and Darkover is just the place that systemized laran the most, or is laran unique to Darkover? Is the Terran EmpireFederation keeping things under wraps because it employs telepaths as agents? There's reason to believe all of these depending on which Darkover book you read and no answer here.

I would have complained about Margaret constantly overhearing the thoughts of everyone around her, but that's eventually explained as being a side effect of her having the Alton Gift and a lack of formal training, which is a reasonable explanation. Sure is convenient for the plot, though.

This book also adds additional weight to Lerrys Ridenow's arguments about joining the Terrans given in Sharra's Exile. Offhand comments by Margaret indicate that in the Empire, genetic engineering to remove tooth decay and macular degeneration is routine and longevity treatments mean that citizens in good health can look forward to living centuries. The only reason Ivor dies in his 90s is because the last treatment failed. Meanwhile, Darkover is basically a pre-literate society that still uses torchlight as the main source of illumination. I was surprised that Margaret wasn't complaining more about the lack of amenities before I realized that if she's doing ethnomusicology she'd be used to it on field work.

On top of all that, most of the characters are completely flat. Lew changes into a laughing jokester despite being depicted in Margaret's memories the same way we last saw him in Sharra's Exile, and while it's true that it's been twenty years, without seeing any of the changes it might as well just be a completely different person. Gabriel and Javanne are basically one-note villains. Only Margaret and Mikhail really get any development, and a lot of that is from Margaret's indiscriminate mind-reading of everyone around her.

I remember liking this a lot when I read it as a child, but it hasn't held up in the least. Very disappointing.

Previous Review: Sharra's Exile.
Next Review: The Shadow Matrix.