Guardian by Joe Haldeman

First published in 1992; published digitally by Open Road Media on September 27, 2016

Rosa Tolliver leaves her husband in Boston after he sodomizes their son. Rosa and her son travel to Dodge City, which is still the far west at the end of the nineteenth century. Most of the journey is by steamboat, giving Joe Haldeman a chance to reflect on Mark Twain and to discuss a number of historical facts that he seems to toss out at random. Not much else of substance happens in the first third of the novel, except for the occasional appearance of a talkative but cryptic raven.

Eventually Rosa takes a lover and her son gets the idea to prospect for gold in Alaska. Rosa gets a gig teaching in a small Alaskan town while her son and new lover are off in the mountains mining for gold. Rosa agrees to this plan despite her raven friend telling her “No Gold.” Rosa is eventually accused of being a witch, and she might be one, given the amount of advice she receives from ravens. Or maybe the raven is a witch. Or maybe the local Alaskan shaman gave Rosa some peyote when she wasn’t looking. The would explain the interplanetary travel that pops up in the last third of the novel.

Assuming they’re real and even if they’re not, the aliens Rosa meets are the most interesting part of the book. Until they appear, the story is pleasant and humane but a little dull. After they leave, the story returns to being pleasant and humane but a little dull.

Rosa’s travels with her raven guardian allow Haldeman another chance to philosophize. His musings — metaphor presented as reality — might not be profound, but they are reasonably wise and intellectually stimulating.

Haldeman had an occasional tendency to delve into religious themes (Forever Free being an obvious example). Guardian flirts with the concept of God but doesn’t pretend to offer any answers. Haldeman is at his best when he writes about war and its consequences, and there is a bit of that here. Haldeman’s prose is also, at times, quite elegant, and in places the story is touching.

Despite the injection of the guardian and angelic aliens and a place where souls dwell and a chatty raven, Haldeman manages to make Guardian into a science fiction novel (rather than the fantasy it initially seems to be) thanks to alternate universes, which can be used to explain just about anything if you set your mind to it. Still, the story seems to be inspired by Carlos Castaneda and I have the strong suspicion that peyote is a better explanation for Rosa’s experiences than travels though the multiverse with a guardian raven.

I’m not sure Guardian coheres as it jumbles together an adventure story, a travelogue, an alternate history, religious mythology, and a mixture of fantasy and science fiction themes. There are certainly parts of the novel I enjoyed and I didn’t dislike any of it, but a good bit of purposeless description does little to advance the late-arriving themes that give the story its heft. The really good parts of the novel are too brief to make the novel as a whole really good

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS