The Golem and the Jinni

I recently finished the book “The Golem and the Jinni” by Helene Wecker. I read and write hard science fiction, but this book is magic realism, so a bit out of my genre. However, I suspected that the Golem’s story would be much like that of a robotess, and it was. If you change the labels a little, it becomes awesome scifi.

The characters in this book are absolutely gorgeous, even the bad guys. The first 25% or so consists almost entirely of character sketches which lead onto each other like winding paths in a forest. Each one loses an important part of themselves, and you feel driven by the hope that they might get it back.

The central characters was, of course, the Golem named Chava. I’d like to give you a very brief sketch of her arc, just to give you some sense of how compelling she is. My writing here can’t do it justice …

Chava is created by an evil wizard to be the wife of some loser who can’t get a proper woman. As a golem, she has a kind of telepathic link to him that makes her do his every wish. You can imagine where this is going, but it never gets there. Her great loss is that he dies of an illness within a few hours of activating her. This tears a giant hole out of her being, but it also frees her to become a better creature. The ragged end of that magic is now drawn to the inner voices of everyone nearby, and she has to resist them to keep from revealing herself.

Chava is horrified by her monster side—and she truly is a monster. When humans get violent toward her, or someone threatens her friends, her personality drifts away and she becomes capable of maiming and killing.

SPOILER ALERT

She marries a man in an attempt to get back to the role she was created for. When he discovers what she is, he is revolted. She starts to go golem on him, but with the last of her fading good side she tells him to flee.

At the end, she trades away her individuality for the life of a friend. She returns to being just a golem, but remembers everything she was before. Yet now she happily beats up the Jinni, the person she truly loves. She takes pleasure in her golem nature, and considers herself finally at peace. The semi-happy ending is that she gets her soul back when the wizard gets stuck in the Jinni’s bottle. However, she can never be fully free from the bargain she made until the wizard dies, which will only happen when the Jinni dies.

The book pretty much ends there, but leaves the implication that the Golem and Jinni work out some kind of relationship within the bounds of their damaged freedom and diametrically opposed natures.

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