The Foretelling is Discouraging

In the first pages of Alice Hoffman’s novel “The Foretelling,” it is evident that the first person narrator, a young girl named Rain, doesn’t have much respect for men. Rain is the daughter of the Queen Alina who rules a tribe of prehistoric Amazon women. Their territory ranges across the steppes of prehistoric Russia near the Black Sea sometime in the late Iron Age.

Rain informs the reader that we do “something no one in the man’s world had yet managed to do. We ride horses.” Since this is fiction in a time before written history, the assertion can’t quite be questioned but just a few paragraphs later, as if for emphasis, Rain declares that her people understood “the language of horses, a language men had yet to learn.” If these boastings weren’t convincing enough to downplay men, she sums up the premise of the novel, “In the time of our people we lived without men as we always had. Men were our enemies….” The reader knows what to expect.

The audience for the novel is most probably girls between the ages of ten and fourteen. References on the copyright page and the dust jacket suggest visiting the web site www.lb-teens.com that leads to a site designed for teen readers. If Hoffman created this character and the other women of the tribe to be heroines, or even role models for such young girls, then the teen age reader might want to reconsider what this girl and these women really represent.

Queen Alina’s pregnancy resulted from her being raped by fifty men and has named her daughter Rain because she is complete sorrow to her mother. Rain has been discarded by her mother and is raised by other elder women in the tribe. If Rain weren’t the queen-to-be by birth, she might have been tossed to the wolves.

Several important warriors in the tribe are both masochistic and sadistic. The bravest of them hacked off their own breasts without flinching and those who killed at least four men in battle partook in an orgy in the evening. To maintain the tribe lineage, the warriors didn’t immediately kill all the men during battles. They captured some, plied them with fermented wine and hemp, seduced them and then killed them. One man who possessed blacksmithing skills, they maimed so he couldn’t escape, and he provided them with a constant stream of iron weapons. Why they could not learn this skill for themselves, after all they were superior to men, is never noted. When it comes to cruelty, they are an efficient tribe.

After one particular battle, Queen Alina takes up with another woman, Penthe, a slave captured from a tribe of men they had defeated. This is not a Platonic relationship. “They walked with their arms around each other, they danced together and slept together. They shared everything.” Rain constantly tried to reconcile with her mother but her mother rejected the overtures. As the queen takes a lover, from Rain’s point of view, she twice discarded by her mother; once at birth and now again in her teen years. Her ego deteriorated rapidly.

No wonder then that Rain, by her own admission, is anti-social. “The girls my age especially had little to do with me…they got out of my way and that was fine with me. I did as I pleased…always alone.” With lots of time on her hands, she spends most of it riding her horse, perfecting her archery skills to kill men, and domesticating a bear. No sooner does she tame the bear when it is quickly killed in a fight with four men. With the help of a boy she kills the four men and the reader has hope than maybe it will be a man who softens Rain but the boy is relegated the periphery of the novel. Rain cares more for the dead bear and is constantly revisiting the place of battle to commune with the bear’s spirit.

Rain, again by her own admission, is reasonably cruel. She hates Penthe but Penthe’s daughter, Io, has also been captured. Rain tells the reader, “I quickly decided to hate Io as well” and she does a splendid job of denigrating the girl.

As the novel rushes toward its ending, Rain sees her folly of believing in war. A rift develops in the tribe and Rain leads half the tribe to another land where they “might even think of peace.” Such rapid conversions are suspect.

It’s a short novel, only 167 pages, but considering its genre of historical fiction mixed with a touch of magical realism, the novel never addresses several important topics. Religious beliefs are mostly minor rites of face painting and tattooing. No gods are mentioned by name and there are no festivals in their honor. A communal meal is never eaten, except for the orgy, and the priestesses primarily function as nannies.

The quotation on the back of dust jacket reads that “The weak are cruel; the strong have no need to be.” This is a cruel book; it had so much potential to be stronger.