A Psalm for the Wild Built Review

With certain books, the core concept is enough to prompt me to put it on my reading list, never mind bothering with a summary or recommendations.  A robot pilgrim visiting with a human sage to learn the secrets of human flourishing is one of those concepts, which explains how such a modern book wound up on my reading list, and why I got around to reading it within this decade.  This presents a problem when it comes time to review a book like this one, because I can’t tell if my lingering dissatisfaction with it is because it really wasn’t as good as it could have been, or because it didn’t match what I had in my head for the concept.

Truthfully, I half expected this to be a kind of version of an old philosophical dialogue, where a robot visits a sage in a cave and the majority of the book is devoted to their conversations and thought experiments.  While this might sound boring, I thought it sounded fascinating.  Considering how much I enjoyed The Man from Earth, a movie that takes place almost entirely as a conversation between some professors in a character’s living room, that’s not terribly surprising.  A Psalm for the Wild Built…is not that.  Indeed, we spend almost half the book before any robots appear, instead following the adventures of a monk as they go around serving tea and serving as a kind of itinerant counselor/confessor.

A brief, and possibly politically incorrect digression: this is the first full-length book I read in which a major character (the main character, in this case) used they/them pronouns, and I found it confusing to read.  Not because of anything about the characterization – in fact, I thought that was quite well done, and that the author did an excellent job of making that an element of the story without it overwhelming the story – but because I kept wondering where the other people were.  Since they/them is plural, I kept getting confused and wondering when someone else had appeared in the scene and who else the words were supposed to be referencing.  Perhaps we could come up with a gender-neutral pronoun that is singular, instead of this confusing plural?  Anyway, now that I’ve probably offended people, back to the review.

Chambers gives us excellent worldbuilding, an intriguing concept, and a kind of parable all at once.  She offers a refreshingly original take on the machine consciousness concept which I was thrilled to read.  It’s closer to utopian than dystopian, and while the mechanisms of machine consciousness sound more magical than technical, that works for this story.  Really, this is a story about an alternate-future-world monk who has some adventures in a vividly evoked and thoroughly thought-out environment and context.  I just happened to be expecting a philosophy piece, and wished for the monk to be a little wiser.  That’s my expectations, though, and nothing against the story as it is written.

There is a fair amount of moralizing involved in A Psalm for the Wild Built, but it is incorporated well enough into the story, and there is enough story independent of that, that the book never devolves into a mere polemic (like Pilgrim’s Progress).  The only critique I can leverage which could not be chalked up to my mismatched expectations for the book is that I wish the monk didn’t use so much profanity.  Yes, I know it’s alternative world and the monks in this setting can swear like sailors if the author wants them to, but I found it off-putting, gratuitous, and somewhat undermining to the story’s overall tone.

A Psalm for the Wild Built really is a fine book, and you’ll probably enjoy it more than I did, since you won’t be expecting a version of Plato’s dialogues taking place in a lonely mountain cave between a robot and a sage.  Maybe I should write such a book, which precisely no one else would be interested in reading.  A lot more people are interested in reading a book like this one, which is a fine piece somewhere on the border between soft science fiction and fantasy.  Quiet, optimistic, and character-driven, this book is a fine antidote for grand stakes and dark places.