Restoree
author: Anne McCaffrey
name: Paul
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1967
rating: 2
read at: 2011/12/22
date added: 2011/12/24
shelves: novel, science-fiction
review:
Usually when I’m going to review a book, I’ll start writing it around the 2/3rds mark. By then, I have a pretty good handle on the plot, the writing style and I can get my initial impressions down, so that when I finish the book, I simply do the edit/rewrite and add the conclusion based on how it all turns out. But with Anne McCaffrey‘s Restoree, I hit that point and realized I had no idea how I felt about the book yet. Then I read to about the 75% mark and still wasn’t sure how I felt. It wasn’t until I was maybe a dozen pages from the end when I finally started to get a sense for where the story was going or have some investment in what was going to happen (or what was not).
Restoree is the tale of Sara, a lonely New Yorker who is kidnapped by aliens and loses all but flashes of her memory between the abduction and her coming-to, when she discovers she has been made to perform rote caregiver tasks as a sort of mindless drone on behalf of a comatose man. As an act of self-preservation she maintains her facade of witlessness until she discovers that there is a sinister purpose for her state and that of her ward, so she hatches a desperate plan to escape the situation and in the process discovers that the man she’s been attending to is the Regent of a faraway planet. This planet, Lothar, has been under constant threat of attack by an invading alien force known as the Mil, and following several decades of relative peace, the planet has fallen under political turmoil. The majority of the book deals with the Regent, a man named Harlan, and Sara trying to escape and right the plot that put Harlan into a drugged stupor under Sara’s care.
Through the story Harlan and Sara fall in love, and Sara has a knack for getting herself into sticky situations since Harlan suspects her of being a Restoree, which is a condition punishable by death, so her origin cannot be revealed. But Sara is ignorant of a lot of Lotharian custom, history and geography so there is some tension about whether or not she will reveal herself at the wrong time, increasing as she gets ever more entangled in the politics of the planet while she tries to reveal the plot against Harlan and re-instate him as Regent.
I think the main issue I had with Restoree is that it’s kind of directionless, and for a short, 250 page book, it really wanders and meanders and takes forever getting to the stuff that really matters to the reader. A lot of the decisions in the writing process are very odd ones, to me. For example, the book reads a bit like a romance between Sara and Harlan, but there is very little romantic tension here. Sure, there are some for-show complexities as Sara becomes a means for a Warlord-elect to undo some baseless rumors which makes her ability to be with Harlan somewhat complicated, but the end result isn’t really a divide between Sara and Harlan, but simply a lack of public declaration. At no point is their relationship really in question or in jeopardy. Additionally, the key plot point of Restoration and Sara being a Restoree is hinted at throughout but isn’t really explained until very late in the book at which point all the fears about it that Harlan hints at end up being more or less unfounded which cheapens a lot of the tension that propels the book forward, such that it is.
There are parts of the book that really work, such as the initial chance encounter that leads Sara to the palace without her allies where she has to resourcefully find a way to make the right friends and navigate the unfamiliar social customs. Additionally an astoundingly late-breaking subplot (which serves also as a very convenient contrivance to interrupt a potentially difficult tribunal) involves a military action that takes place remotely. The effect is like a story told about a space shuttle mission where the point of view never leaves ground control. The level of tension, aided in large part by the lack of concrete knowledge of what is really happening out on the battlefield, is gripping. But these segments only fill a few dozen pages. Way too much time is devoted to things like hatching a scheme for Sara to infiltrate the palace—a plan that is almost immediately scrapped, after it’s been mapped out in great detail over five or six pages—or to Sara expressing dismay over certain people or events while everyone around her says, “Nah, don’t worry about it.”
Sara herself is a well-realized, admirable heroine. Harlan is a bit too superman-ish, but he’s a reasonable foil for Sara. My biggest problem with the rest of the cast is that Ms. McCaffrey chooses too many names that are similar to others: Jessl and Jokan, Sara and Fara, Gleto and Gorlot. It gets kind of confusing and is just unnecessary.
I didn’t dislike Restoree, but it had too many weird tangents and too little focus for me to really enjoy. I liked McCaffrey’s style and her imagination and attention to certain details that might have been overlooked by other authors (the technology level of Lothar was particularly interesting and novel) indicated there is enough promise on display here for me to want to dive into some of her other work. But I just can’t give more than faint praise for a book that reads a bit too much like a first draft.