An Eye for Dark Places

Although she adroitly combines feminism with futurism in her debut novel, Marder fails to achieve the marriage of plot and setting that Lessing, Atwood and Le Guin have used effectively in this subgenre. In a vaguely post-apocalyptic England ruled by a shadow government called the Triangle, bioengineered ``Dulls'' perform menial labor, physical and mental capacity can be accelerated by machines, and women often see strange visions. Sephony Berg-Benson lives on a farm outside London with her inattentive husband of 26 years, Marek, and three of their four children. After an alien being named Claro leads her into an alternate dimension through a hole that appears in her kitchen floor, she begins to question her circumscribed society. The author uses hypnotically surreal prose to create the framework for a fascinating future world, but her story never goes beyond the familiar parameters of a housewife's journey towards liberation. Tantalizing details and unanswered questions--How did women lose the freedom they achieved in the 20th century? Why has society become so cruel?--suggest that the author has more interesting ideas than she was able to develop here. The work amounts to an intriguing near-hit from a promising new novelist. ( July )