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The Healer
by Michael Blumlein
(Pyr, $25.00, 359 pages; hardcover, published in July 2005.)
 Michael
Blumlein's third novel, The Healer, is set in the far future
on a colonized planet where humanity has split into Grotesques, who
are treated as chattel and servants, and "normal" humans,
who are dominant.
Grotesques possess a hideous cranial deformity and an extra orifice,
the meli; some Grotesques develop the gift of healing. They can psychically
isolate ailments, extract them from their patients by osmosis, and then
expel them through their meli, a process that is disturbingly analogous
to birthing. The expelled illness, called a Concretion, acquires life
and is potentially dangerous. The meli itself resembles a vulva, while
the act of healing is quite sexual.
Healers are slaves, forced to service their human masters, and then
discarded once "the Drain" -- a malady common to healers,
who are forbidden to heal each other -- has exhausted their gift.
The healers are an obvious metaphor for the plight of women, healing
standing in for fecundity, the Drain for menopause, the human/Grotesque
hierarchy for patriarchy, etc.
The Healer is filled with intense moments and powerful imagery,
but it's also a mess. It feels like a text that has been struggled with,
reworked and reshaped and tweaked until the author finally had enough
and decided to push it out of his own creative meli and, come what may,
let it acquire life.
The plot involves the travails of a healer whose talents may forever
change the social order, but long sections are tangential, even superfluous,
and essential details are carelessly skimmed over, while the concluding
chapters suffer from a jarring shift in tone.
Page by page, The Healer is compelling and fascinating, and
certainly a novel worth reading, but it's a savage creature that the
author failed to rein in, much like the healers cannot control their
Concretions.
Originally published, in substantially different form, in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 11 March 2006.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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Elsewhere on the web:
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