A Girl With a Dream

It's about time we started seeing girls as the stars of adventure stories, which is why it's been such a pleasure to see the recent surge in books featuring young girls as such heroes. Consider, for example, Jostein Gaarder's erudite epic Sophie's World or Philip Pullman's Carnegie Award-winning fantasy The Golden Compass. Both of these books feature young women as the epic heroes of their own journeys of exploration and education, both were first released in Europe and both have a thing about Scandinavia and snow. Brian Hall's new coming-of-age epic, The Saskiad, has these things in common with the aforementioned books, but in all important respects it stands completely apart. Hall's book is a pleasurable read, a titillatingly sensual piece of prose and a fascinating intellectual journey.

As the title suggests, The Saskiad is structured along the lines of classical epic: just as the Aeneid is about Aeneas, so is the Saskiad the story of Saskia White. Saskia, a twelve-year-old of fierce intelligence and a tendency toward literary agglomeration, lives with her ex-hippie mother and a horde of small children and quiet adults in a tumbledown former commune near Ithaca, New York. Busying herself during the day with school, the little ones and cooking duties, Saskia spends her off hours reading. The imaginary world she creates around herself is rich with the images and characters of her favorite stories--not "fantasy" tales, but ancient epics of sailors, travelers and explorers, from Odysseus and Marco Polo to Horatio Hornblower and that island-bound explorer of the sky, Tycho Brahe. The towering absence of Saskia's barely-remembered father, a Danish sailor named Thomas, fills her imagination with images of captains, the sea and Northern lands; the towering presence of her beautiful and world-wise best friend, Jane Singh, fills her dreams with images of willowy, "dusky maidens" welcoming Saskia the Wanderer into distant ports. Carefully balanced between worlds, with the imaginative richness of her inner ocean just managing to stave off the outside world of adolescent rebellion and incipient high-school geekdom, Saskia's mental dialogue with the reader will remind many of us of ourselves at that paradoxically selfabsorbed, doubting and arrogant, callous and tender age.

And it is Hall's solidity in maintaining and expanding Saskia's consciousness and her narrative to the reader that makes the book consistently interesting and enjoyable to read. The body of the plot takes off in the second part when Saskia receives a letter from Thomas in Denmark inviting her to come spend the summer hiking north with him. Saskia and Jane take off for the land of the Phaiakians (the name of a god-like race in the Odyssey, whom Saskia in typical fashion maps onto her father's unknown people). The rest of the novel evolves into a series of journeys, both literal and metaphoric, which could be mapped to any of a number of myths and wind up being a somewhat ambivalent coming-of-age story, about running away to find yourself and coming home again.

The journey itself, while interesting, is not the most important layer of the text, but the prose--always competent but often unremarkable--becomes iridescent when we enter Saskia's dream worlds. Initially set in fantastic locales, in dusty markets heaped high with silks and sea-bound observatories straining toward the stars, the dream and outer worlds slowly move together and come to terms over the possession of Saskia's perception.

Hall plays amusing and intriguing games with language and imagery, which unfold slowly as the reader progresses. These mysteries and the moments of gem-like color in the imaginary sequences are often what makes the reading worthwhile.

The myth-making and myth-mapping lie both on the surface and beneath the waves of the novel. Critics mention patterns alluding to the Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick, but the most evident and important allusions are to the Odyssey itself and to James Joyce's towering modern interpretation of that epic, Ulysses. It's probably not unfair to say that Hall seems to be trying to create a contemporary, child's-scale version of Ulysses. The intriguing thing about Saskia is that her adventures, while densely packed with meaning, are also straightforwardly narrated; precocious kids--like the hero herself--will be able to read her adventures without a problem...if their parents don't mind things getting a little graphic.

For The Saskiad does bring up extremely adult issues: ecological activism and "ecofascism," the legacy of the communes and free-love systems of the 70s, the kinds of love that can form a home and the lies that family members tell each other, the "salty" nature of adolescent sexuality. Hall deserves commendation for apparently realizing that emerging adolescent awareness of sexuality is not a monolithic experience and for portraying it in Saskia in a way unique to and coherent with her character. Saskia has a homoerotically charged relationship with the beautiful Jane from the first, and discovery of sexuality, both same sex and hetero-sexual, quite clearly mark stops on Saskia's journey toward finding herself. Hall even manages to write both honestly and tastefully of another such stop, masturbation.

Hall turns out to be a Harvard alum--a 1981 summa graduate in English, thus giving English concentrators hope despite that bleak job market--but you shouldn't let that fact dissuade you from reading his book. The Saskiad may or may not be a worthy successor to Ulysses, but it is a terribly enjoyable read and it's studded with images and ideas that will make your mind sing. If you're in the mood, you probably won't regret splurging on the hardcover edition of The Saskiad--that format seems somehow most appropriate for a heroic epic and its courageous and engaging hero.