Heartfire (Alvin Maker Series #5) Book

This fifth volume of the series finds Alvin and Peggy now married, and expecting the birth of their first child, but separated for much of the book by separate missions far apart geographically. His continuing quest for understanding of how to build the "Crystal City" of his vision will take him and his small group of companions to New England, to observe a model human community founded on solidly moral and religious principles. But this is a New England where the Puritan theocracy never fell, and which still hangs "witches" --including anybody who has any visible supernatural knack. Meanwhile, Peggy still hopes to emancipate the slaves AND prevent the looming bloody war over slavery that all the possible threads of the futures she foresees tell her is impending. That will take her on a journey to Camelot (known in our world as Charleston, SC) to seek an audience with the King-in-exile, a mission as dangerous in its own way as Alvin's. And in the background (and sometimes the foreground) is always the wild card posed by Alvin's jealous younger brother Calvin, possessed of significant but untrained powers as a Maker himself, but capricious, vain and lacking in morals and maturity.

A lot of the trademark strengths of this series are evident here, including Card's strong storytelling skills, sometimes singing prose, and attention to ethical and psychological verities. The latter underlies his outstanding characterizations, both of his wholly fictional characters --new ones here include the slave girl Fishy, the confused and conflicted Purity, and the malevolent witch hunter Micah Quill (whom you want to reach into the page and strangle)-- and the ones who are counterparts of real people in our world, with the same personalities but their situations changed by the changed circumstances here, including Honore de Balzac, John James Audubon, Denmark Vesey, and an aged John Adams. (Readers should remember that this is a version of history in which Adams and Jefferson didn't reconcile in old age; so the jaundiced view of Jefferson that Adams expresses, and the ideas he attributes to him, don't necessarily reflect Card's own view.) And a strong point of his characterizations is the recognition of the mixture of good and bad, saint and sinner, that can live in us all. "There's no one who doesn't have memories he wishes he didn't have," Peggy says at one point. "And there are crimes that arise from --from decent desires gone wrong, from justified passions carried too far. Crimes that began only as mistakes. I've learned never to judge people. Of course I judge whether they're dangerous or not, or whether they did right or wrong, how can anyone live without judging? What I mean is, I can't condemn them. A few, yes, a few who love the suffering of others, or who never think of others at all, worthless souls who exist only to satisfy themselves. But those are rare. Do you even know what I'm talking about?" (I think I can answer that with an affirmative, from my own observations of life!)

This time, though, I didn't give the book the five stars I gave the preceding series volumes. That's only because I felt Card dropped the ball by not paying attention to some significant details, both in his world-building and his chronology. The previous book was explicitly clear that Appalachee had been admitted to the U.S. as a slave state (in fact, Jackson, who was from there, became President in that book). But at the outset here, we're told that the question of Appalachee's admission to the U.S., and the continuation of slavery there, are still moot points (and a serious bone of contention between the U.S. and the Crown Colonies). For a reader who takes the details of the alternate world seriously, and regards Card's attention to alternate history as a strength of the series and a key part of its appeal, that kind of sloppy mistake is a defect of craftsmanship that bulks large --and should, because I think readers should demand attention to detail from writers! Also, in the earlier part of the book, Card appears to forget that given the chronology here, Arthur Stuart is only twelve years old --his voice wouldn't be changing at that age nor, probably, would he have been interested in girls (kids in that era weren't fed on hormone- drenched meat, and didn't suffer from precocious puberty as a result). But those flaws didn't keep me from really liking the book!

A major interpretive issue with this series is the role Card's Mormon beliefs play into it, and to what extent Alvin is a clone of our world's Joseph Smith (not, IMO, a very big extent, though a comparison exists). The only indication of a direct influence of Mormon theology so far in the series appears in one place here, where Alvin reflects to the effect that God, having made the world, wanted the people in it to "be Makers with Him." (Alvin's magical knack involves considerable power to re-shape matter at the molecular level by "looking" into it and willing the small particles to line up the way he wants, but Card posits that people in general may have some talents along this line and can learn to exercise them by training and practice.) This line can be interpreted as a reference to the Mormon idea of salvation as (for men) eventual deification --and given Card's Mormonism, it's not improbable that he sees it that way. But it's one line in a 336-page book --and it can be interpreted (if you want to apply D. H. Lawrence's "trust the tale and not the teller" adage :-)) in a less extreme way. (From an evangelical perspective, there is a very real sense in which God does want us --and even equips us-- to be "makers" with him: he gives us talent, creativity and imagination that involves bringing into being a great many products of human craftsmanship, inventiveness and hard work that wouldn't exist without us, and that we can take satisfaction in.)