Obsolete Your Idols

I’ve read the Roger Zelazny novel Lord of Light numerous times. First, as a pre-teen doggedly going to the end of the science fiction section of my public library and reading the books there, beginning with the alphabetically last author and rewinding to the beginning of the alphabet. In my memory, I read them all at least once, then I started going back to re-read my favorites. Lord of Light would have been one of the first, its poetry stuck in my head.

Over the years since then, I’ve read it again. Sometimes after an abyssmal book, to cleanse the palette. Sometimes when I was facing a big decision in my life and wanted an absorbing distraction. Most recently, I read it because it was the Book of Honor at Potlatch 2010. The panel dedicated to discussing the book introduced one of the reasons it was selected: cultural appropriation. That’s one of those hot phrases in recent discussions about writing. If cultural appropriation exists [and JT Stewart made a good case that it or something rather like it does], this novel is an example of it on two levels.

First, Zelazny was neither a Hindu nor a Buddhist, but the setting is constructed from pieces of the Hindu culture and beliefs and the protagonist deploys a scheme with Buddhist trappings.

Second, within the context of the novel, the reason for the Hindu and Buddhist bits are that the characters have deliberately chosen to mine out the useful levers from those cultures and use them to shape the world.  In the clearest terms, they have appropriated those cultures and deployed the likenesses which will motivate people and control their environments.

That was the first surprise for me in the panel discussion, an angle I hadn’t considered of the story, and one which came in with two tines. The second surprise in the panel discussion was learning that most of the panelists did not like the story. Imagine that, an award winning novel, widely read, and most of the people who showed up to talk about it didn’t care for it. Some conceded that they had liked it when first reading it but upon further reflection or re-reading, they liked it less, and sometimes not at all. One panelist didn’t like it when she first read it, until she read more analysis of it and then the book was improved by those alternate interpretations and readings of it.

Which is a long way of saying that hardly anyone there who got to speak agreed with me, about Lord of Light being a worthy and re-readable book, an interesting book, a lyrical book, in short, a good book. So this positive review score I’m giving it is one I give in the face of bold disagreement by others. Which I’m okay with.

The story of the book is told largely through a very long flashback. The protagonist is summoned, literally reincarnated, his atman or soul stuff into a body. When he’s more at home in the body, he remembers his past before he was discorporated and that is the meat of the book.  Eventually we find out how he was unable to keep body and soul together and then there’s a wrap up where he wins the war he’s been fighting for about a century. The value of this story is not in being ignorant of the storyline, but in the prose it’s presented in, the implications of the actions and, as with all Zelazny stories, the things he doesn’t tell us.

I think that last element is what keeps me coming back to Zelazny’s writings; he doesn’t tell the reader everything, he takes the story halfway and then the reader has to step forward to meet it there. If you are a reader who needs everything explained, you will not like Zelazny. But that kind of challenge slash puzzle slash opportunity is exactly the kind of narrative my mind seizes upon and savors. So it is with this work.  We’re given bursts of lush prose and vast empty spaces of implication and incompleteness.

Not to say it’s a flawless work.  There are points which bothered me the first time and still do.  An example would be how  extracting the stored pattern of Sam’s consciousness from the media in which it was stored removes it from that media. Or how that pattern can claim to have experienced consciousness while in the media. But those can be glossed over and forgiven.

Ordinarily I try to wrap up my reviews with lists of people who might and might not like a given work. This review is different, I’m experimenting with hReview markup in response to an article on why book reviews are hard to search for. If you miss those lists, comment and I’ll revise.