Book review: “Voorloper” by Andre Norton

Andre Norton’s science-fiction novels tend to be adventures in which a central character, usually a young man, sometimes with a friend or two, goes on a journey to discover the secret behind a mystery.

This journey takes place in a strange environment in which foul smells and decayed vegetation are indications of danger and deadliness.  Non-human creatures can be allies, but, more often, they’re enemies, fighting perhaps out of a violent nature or maybe from a desire to protect home territory.

For the central character, the journey is about survival, about fending off hostile surroundings, about avoiding or dealing with attacks by other sentient beings.

Such attacks and such dangers are portrayed by Norton as the routine interactions of Nature.  Her humans are invading a place by the simple act of landing and exploring.  The place itself and the beings living there react by defending themselves.  It’s survival of the fittest.

 

A novel about evil

Even though, in some aspects, Norton’s 1980 novel Voorloper fits her general pattern, it is something much different.

It is a novel about evil.

Bart s’Lorn, about 20, is the son of Mac Turley s’Ban.  The two of them are voorlopers on the planet named Voor. A voorloper wanders around the planet’s landscape in a manner akin to the voyageurs of the 18^th and 19^th century in North America.

However, while those French-Canadians were out away from civilization in order to trade with the Indians for furs, voorlopers have no human outposts, except for some mining camps, to visit.  That’s because the eight pioneer settlements in the northern portion of the world were all wiped out by what has come to be known as the Shadow Death.

Voorlopers are the sort of humans who prefer their own company and like to live on their own skills.  That’s what Bart and his father are doing, but all in the service of the father’s burning desire to solve the mystery of the Shadow Death which claimed his wife and everyone else in the village of Mungo Town — all the inhabitants except for five-year-old Bart.

For a trip to one of the mining camps, the father and son are joined by a healer named Illo who is on a mission of her own to get to the bottom of the Shadow Death.

Although he’d rather not, Bart’s father is required by custom to permit Illo to accompany them.  And when, in a storm, he is badly injured, Illo, who is maybe a year or two younger than Bart, does all she can to help him.  Nonetheless, he dies, making Bart vow to bring his body back to Mungo Town.

 

“Bones”

The journey of Bart and Illo to Mungo Town and beyond is an odyssey into the heart of evil.

Both of the young people, for reasons no one understands, came away unharmed when the Shadow Death overwhelmed their towns.  Illo was three when the attack took place at Voor’s Grove. Three other survivors there — two younger twins and an adult, driven crazy — have since left the planet.

So, Bart and Illo are unique on Voor, and they have personal reasons for their quest.

As far as Bart and Illo know, the people in the villages attacked by the Shadow Death simply disappeared.  So Bart is shocked at what he discovers when, with his father’s body, he enters Mungo Town for the first time:

I stood staring in disbelief…For what I was looking at was bones — skeletons huddled together along the walls of the hall.  Almost as if the whole village had been lined up by a ruthless enemy and blasted down all at one time…There were no signs of the bleached bones of blaster fire which was my only knowledge of any weapon which could hit so widely and suddenly as to wipe out a whole village.

Bart places his father’s body next to the line of skeletons.  “[W]hich of those skeletons might be my mother?  I flinched from that thought as if it were a blow.”

 

“Burned like acid”

Also disconcerting for Bart is the vegetation that covers much of the ground, a kind of “fleshy growth” that seems unnatural.

A small branch I had to fend away broke with a pulpy, squashing sound, while from the mangled leaves which the sled crushed there arose a rank odor…

There was no wind to reach exploring fingers here — yet — those blossoms moved! Their heads, which appeared near too heavy to be supported by tall, spindly stems, swayed, dipped, arose again.  All were wide open and their darker centers had the unpleasant seeming of — eyes.

Much more unpleasant is what happens to Bart when he trips and falls:

I flung out one hand instinctively to stop my fall and puffy leaves exploded under my weight, shooting out thin streams of sap.  Then I was face down and near screaming with pain, for that sap, spattering my skin, burned like acid.

 

“Utter evil”

From this point on, Bart and Illo begin to see the landscape, in what it shows and what it keeps hidden, as sinister.

They are walking into Voor’s Grove when they see the village’s undamaged houses stained green as if by mold or algae, as if in defilement.

For this vegetation was evil.  I was sure of that as I was of my own person.  It was rotten, though that rot was not visible to the eye — it was the flowering of foul decay.

Later, in a fantastic city, they find a flight of steps, and inside the steps are faces with life-like features, as human as Bart and Illo.  “It is evil! Evil!” says Illo.

Still later, she talks of the city and the secret the two of them found there as “that garden place of utter evil.”

 

A sobering lesson

Voorloper reads more slowly than many of Norton’s novels because she is telling a complex story with a shocking conclusion.

It is not a story of natural dangers, but of something insidious, something created out of the ingenuity of intelligent beings.

Bart and Illo learn the secret of why they were spared in the Shadow Death attacks, and it is a sobering lesson, not only about themselves but also about their people.  Voorloper is one of Andre Norton’s most thought-provoking novels.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

7.9.24