Book Review: Seventh Son

Orson Scott Card

1987

Awards: Locus

Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Seventh Son is the first novel in Orson Scott Card’s multi-volume “Tales of Alvin Maker” series, which is set in the early 1800s in an alternate America. Card’s version of America has the same landscape and contains many of the same celebrities as ours, but history has taken a slightly different course, so geographical boundaries and the roles of pivotal figures are often very different.

And in Card’s fictional America, folk legends and traditional magic are real. Some people (primarily churchmen) deride it as superstition or even heresy, but it works nonetheless.

The series’ central character is Alvin Miller, Jr., the thirteenth child of a white farm family. They have settled in Wobbish Territory (what we would call “Wabash,” in central Indiana). Alvin’s birth status as the seventh son of a seventh son means that he has been born with powers of tremendous import—the ability to fix things, to create, to heal. But it also means that there are people who are suspicious and afraid of him, and that there are natural forces in the world that don’t seem to want him to survive. He’s always having to avoid suddenly falling roof beams, flooding rivers, and giant runaway millstones.

When I read the synopsis of Seventh Son on the back cover of my library’s paperback edition, and I learned that it covered the first ten years of Alvin’s life, I thought for sure it was going to be a hokey, over-sweet children’s story about magic. But it actually is, as advertised, a serious and sometimes grim tale about a boy having to carve his own path in life against tough odds, while also trying to remain sensitive and caring of others.

The book sucks you in right away by starting with the story of Alvin’s birth. Alvin’s mother (nine months pregnant with him), father, and all twelve brothers and sisters are in a wagon train making their way westward across the Hio territory. They make it about halfway across the Hatrack River when a sudden raging flood swamps them all. The local townspeople come to rescue them, but not before one brother is swept away downstream and Alvin’s mother goes into labor.

A few months after Alvin is born, his family migrates from Hatrack to the northwestern side of Wobbish Territory where they found the town of Vigor Church (named for the brother who died in the river). This is where Alvin spends his first ten years, growing up and navigating forces both human and supernatural. Some of his influences are positive, like the traveler Taleswapper, the first person who really understands Alvin and recognizes his potential, and who becomes a mentor to him. And some are negative, like the local Presbyterian preacher, Reverend Thrower, who thinks Alvin is the devil’s spawn.

Orson Scott Card is an active Mormon, which makes me think that the treatment of religion would be particularly important to him in his writing. But I’m not sure what to make of the messages Card is sending about religion in this book.

On the one hand, Alvin and many of the other people in his world are definitely in touch with something supernatural—some kind of force that lets them do things such as calm people down, protect loved ones from harm, or see into the future. They call it having a “knack.” And it is a fact that Alvin can do magical things, and has a great reserve of natural powers to draw on, and that he is in danger from other powers that mean him harm.

But at the same time, the practitioners of established religions are some of the least sympathetic characters in the book. Reverend Thrower is twenty-four years old and supremely arrogant; he sees it as his mission to convert everyone in the territory to his church, even though he really considers them all loathsome “Red Men” and “English scum”. He is full of judgment, intolerance, and hate.

Reverend Thrower is frustrated by Alvin, because Alvin constantly questions anything that doesn’t make sense to him, including most of what the Reverend preaches. What the Reverend thinks is sophisticated theological paradox (e.g. “God on His Topless Throne”), Alvin thinks is silly or funny—and you agree with Alvin.

Alvin’s sister Eleanor, who is an avid believer in folk magic, marries Armor-of-God Weaver, a devout churchman. Armor-of-God prohibits Eleanor from practicing what he thinks are her silly superstitions, but she continues to do it in secret, under his nose, and has better luck protecting her family from harm than he does with all his virtuous posturing.

Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, himself practiced religious folk magic when he was younger, and drew on many of those folk beliefs (like scrying) when founding his own religion. So it is interesting to me that there are elements in this book that seem to evoke Mormon tradition while celebrating folk religion at the same time. Taleswapper, for example, carries a notebook in which he writes down new proverbs that occur to him; they come to his mind in the form of letters of flame, showing him what should be written on the page. Joseph Smith exhibited a similar mysticism when he transcribed his Book of Mormon based on visions he saw while looking at seeing stones in the bottom of a hat, and he set a precedent for other elders to add to the canon when they saw holy visions as well.

                      

Anyway, specific religious meaning aside, Orson Scott Card has a real talent for this kind of story. Like Card’s other boy hero, Ender Wiggin, Alvin Miller is a precocious child with overwhelming potential. Like Ender, Alvin is beset by ferocious enemies and bullies. And, like Ender, because of his abilities, Alvin has to grow up too quickly, largely on his own, learning from his own mistakes, first to find his own path to survival and then later to try to bring meaning to his life.

What is especially appealing about Alvin is that his powers validate life and creativity. Alvin is a maker: a person who is naturally able to put things together strongly and beautifully. He can do this on a big scale by healing gaping wounds or by building furniture and machinery, and he can do this on a small scale by making tiny woven grass “bug baskets” for fun. But no matter the scale, every time he makes something, he pushes back the great destructive forces of the universe, even a little bit. Every effort is important and worthwhile, no matter how small and pointless it seems.

The book ends with Alvin at age ten, preparing to leave his family home to become a blacksmith’s apprentice, but Alvin’s story continues on in the next book, Red Prophet.