The Book of Joan opens with an epigraph from Doris Lessing: “We are all creatures of the stars”. It’s a quote from her 1979 science fiction novel Shikasta, about a world that has destroyed itself through environmental damage and war. At a moment when the end of life as we know it feels even more likely than it did in 1979, Lidia Yuknavitch follows Lessing in imagining in precise detail what might come after life on Earth. Her book has a similar level of ambition to Lessing’s novel, going deep into history at the same time as it dwells in the future. In this case, the history is medieval.
One premise of The Book of Joan is that the 21st century, for all its technological advances, has returned us to pre-modern levels of brutality and strife. There are children fighting once again; there are religious crusades; land is seized at will. Yuknavitch takes three real people from medieval France and reimagines them in a post-apocalyptic future. They are the romance poet Jean de Meun (author of part of The Romance of the Rose), his poetical adversary the proto-feminist writer Christine de Pizan, described by Simone de Beauvoir as the first woman to “take up her pen in defence of her sex”, and the girl warrior with apparently magical powers, Joan of Arc.
In a world that has become more virtual, the characters believe in the power of art and of what is left of their bodies
Related: Joan of Arc – feminist icon?
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