Kathleen Maher is a gifted fiction writer. The stories are unusual but always compelling and her characters are three-dimensional. She calls her blog posts "work in progress" but they are better than a lot of stuff I read. I highly recommend Diary of a Heretic
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A companion piece to the author’s popular The Aphorisms of Kherishdar, M. C. A. Hogarth’s The Admonishments of Kherishdar explores the darker side of its alien society. Where the Aphorisms exalts the contentment of the many who fit in, the Admonishments tastes the pain of the few who do not, and, usually, that pain’s resolution.
The Aphorisms should be read first for general background, among other things, and an understanding of an empire in which caste, family, and the common good are all-important. The vignettes explain not only these larger issues but the philosophy and outlook of the people as well, all with the help of a character known as The Calligrapher. The Calligrapher relates these vignettes, each containing a little lesson, expressly in order to explain his society to us. With his help we find out how his alien (yet somehow Asiatic) society is supposed to function, and why. In the vignettes of the Admonishments, we find out what happens when members of the society go astray—and, in some cases, why these transgressions are considered a problem.
At the heart of The Admonishments is the official disciplinarian of Kherishdar, a shadowy figure known as Shame. It is Shame’s duty and his calling not to simply punish the criminals and miscreants of his society but to leave them enlightened and very, very unlikely to ever fall into error—at least, not the same error—again. Therefore the title: Admonishments.
These tend not to be comfortable stories. Importantly, they are told not by Shame but by the people he confronts. They are about anger, resentment and punishment, among other things, and are not so generally heartwarming as the Aphorisms. They are, however, sharper and more immediate, and, I think, more accessible in the sense of being more straightforward and focused. The transgression is explained, the admonishment makes sense, and (we hope) the pain is resolved.
Not all of these offenses are recognizable as crimes in our society; in Kherishdar, we find, one can be corrected for not wanting children, for wanting to work past retirement age, or for, of all things, harboring unwarranted feelings of guilt. Readers of the Aphorisms will not be surprised to find that the transgressions and the (sometimes inventive) corrections reflect a strict caste society with an unyielding emphasis on conformity. That the person who metes out these admonishments is called Shame is no accident.
Also in keeping with the Aphorisms, Shame’s corrections are based on intense understanding of each person’s failing. He finds ways to get people to identify with their victims, ways to get them to see why their society’s rules should be followed, and ways to get them to reconsider their lives. Some of his corrections are harsh; some are gentle. A noble whose fault is an unwillingness to “correct” underlings is bound and read his duties, then released:
"We are done," he said.
His eyes rested on mine, waiting. I frowned as I met them. "Is there something else?" I asked, fretful.
He said, "This is your Correction, rathkedi. How do you feel?"
"Clean," I answered unthinking, and then my breath stopped. "Oh. This is what I deny them . . . !"
Eventually, though, it understandably gets to be a bit too much for Shame. The corrector himself needs help.
It may sound as though I’m relating a plot, but unless you count the above-mentioned breakdown, there really isn’t one. These are separate vignettes, each Admonishment is narrated by the person being Admonished—not by Shame, not by any one other person.
Which leads me to one of my few complaints. It would have been nice if the narrators had more personality and individuality. These are perhaps not highly valued traits in Kherishdar, but then, the narrators here are rule-breakers, and breakers of disparate rules at that. They might sound a little less similar to one another.
There is another way in which sound and style work against the Admonishments as compared to the Aphorisms. The language here is fluid and sufficiently graceful, though not as poetic as in the Aphorisms; a disappointment to many readers as the quiet, reflective, rather haiku-like language of the Aphorisms is one of its main attractions. It would be too much to expect the Admonishments to sound the same way; who could be so tranquil while being admonished? Consequently, the Admonishments are related in a style that’s just a bit poetic . . . poetic enough to make it a proper companion piece but not too poetic (or peaceful) for the subject matter.
Like the Aphorisms, the Admonishments offer food for thought. The emotional range is wider than in the Aphorisms and the writing does carry this effectively. Some of the crimes are dreadful and their stories, not surprisingly, a little hard to take. These stories offer, I think, more impact than do the lessons of the Aphorisms. The resonance here is strong and universal; the imaginative view of an alien culture takes a definite back seat. As with the Aphorisms, post-vignette Discussions are offered which are worth reading.
I must admit I was disappointed when I reached the end and got to Hogarth’s “Coda;” I was expecting one more story, perhaps an epilogue, but found “only” a picture. Not to denigrate the artwork—I wish I could draw like that—but I was hoping (and assuming) that the work would wrap up a little less abruptly. I guess I wasn’t quite ready to leave.
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These stories are not nearly as strong as Aphorisms of Kherishdar, and for me suffer both from stylistic and intellectual approach.
Each piece in this collection is told by a different narrator, so the sparse description and brevity doesn’t have the benefit of building on itself over time. They do build into a characterization of the person of Shame, who is never a narrator, but while I like the idea the result was weak.
I often found the stories ungrounded, because they are little more than a voice describing only one extraordinary, often painful moment in their lives. I get no sense of who they are other than this ‘sin’ and their reaction to their ‘Corrections.’ As another commenter noted, the voices often sound the same and end up blurring together. To me the voices didn’t seem like realistic portrayals of the inner thoughts of people from these walks of life, but rather the tropes of people from these walks of life. There was little nuance in their characterization, nothing for me to connect to something deeper.
Admonishments of Kherishdar relies much more heavily on the morally relativistic ‘This might not work for us but it works for them’ idea than Aphorisms, and so the weakness there was magnified significantly.
The Ai-Naidar are bipedal mammals who have developed a (presumably) agrarian-based, hierarchical, urbanized civilization. They appear to have two eyes, ears, hands, feet, and a mouth. From reading both collections I have no reason to believe their weather, geology, flora and fauna, solar radiation, gravity, physical senses, or diet are in any way significantly different from ours (they do not, for instance, have a bi-annual plague of fire-eating insects). Essentially, they are us, but with fur, cat-ears, claws, and a tail. Thus it’s hard for me to suspend my disbelief when presented with ‘They’re different from us and what doesn’t work for us works for them.’ I don’t see how they are different from us, or why shaming, torture, and brainwashing would work healthily for them. Also, despite how ‘different’ they are, they seem to espouse rather mainstream views on monogamy, abortion, and possibly masochism. I also don’t buy that a society insisted to be a near utopia would have the psychological ills described. Those psychological ills are very much grounded in our civilization.
The stories are still thought-provoking, but without the precision and grace of Aphorisms. There are a handful of stories in here that evoked the same rewarding internal conflicts in me that Aphorisms did that I think are worth checking out:
-Non-Conformity -Vanity -Perversion -Ignorance -Tolerance -Cradle -Calling
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