What a pleasant surprise this book was!
Put simply, I was an actual part of the novel. I was there. I met the characters, I struggled with them in their tribulations, the fantastic, the gritty edge-of-your-seat brushes with nasty death, the intrigue. Though this world is not one where I’d like permanent residence, it was welcome escape for a couple of hours.
I can’t stress deeply enough how alive, how original these characters are. The novel is best described, I think, as a melange of travelogue, espionage, and apocalyptic dystopia. A colorful group of men, women, and aliens come together to visit “hot sites” in a post-nuclear-holocaust earth, with the fate of our fallen world in the balance somehow. In this regard it reminded me a bit of Gordon Eklund’s The Grayspace Beast. But Zelazny’s ensemble: Conrad Nimikos, mad scientist George and his wife Ellen, Diane or Red Wig, Hasan the assassin, Phil the poet, Don Dos Santos *, and, of course, blue-skinned Cort Myshtigo, alien from the world orbiting Vega: they leapt off the page at me, lounging fat in my mushroom-colored catcher’s mitt of a sofa, seized my hand and brought me forward to Earth’s future.
The writing is filled with genuinely witty repartee, smart and sarcastic without being sour, funny when unexpected and deep when you’re getting ready to run or fight for your life. The whole thing flowed for me, Csíkszentmihályi-style, and I fell into the story. We begin with an antihero – Conrad, this immortal – at a cocktail party, and shortly we’re knee-deep in the Zelaznian menagerie. The body of the novel concerns various vignettes on the atom-ravaged Earth: a voodoo ceremony, a trip to the pyramids, back to fragmented Greece which may or may not be the Greece of Homer and Hesiod. Rivalries and friendships form and break, twist this way and that, as factions in this octet debate whether or not the alien needs to be killed to protect the future of the Earth – and just what information is this hated Cort here to scoop up?
Excerpts that pleased me to no end:
She moved like a huge rubber doll, not without grace, stepping to the monotonous thunder of Papa Joe’s drumming. After a time this sound filled everything – my head, the earth, the air – like maybe the whale’s heartbeat seemed to half-digested Jonah. I watched the dancers. And I watched those who watched the dancers.
* * *
Hasan, though, came beside me while I was standing there, staring out over the suddenly swollen and muddy Nile. We stood together for a time and then he said, “Your woman is gone and your heart is heavy. Words will not lighten the weight, and what is written is written. But let it also be put down that I grieve with you.” Then we stood there awhile longer and he walked away.
* * *
Ellen is pregnant again, all delicate and big-waisted, and won’t talk to anybody but George. George wants to try some fancy embryosurgery, now, before it’s too late, and make his next kid a water-breather as well as an air-breather, because of all that great big virgin frontier down underneath the ocean, where his descendants can pioneer, and him be father to a new race and write an interesting book on the subject, and all that. Ellen is not too hot on the idea, though, so I have a hunch the oceans will remain virgin a little longer.
Plus the book has one of the best twist endings in the final handful of pages and one of the best closing couplets I have ever read.
Grade: A-plus, easy.
This Immortal is the novel version of the serialized novel And Call Me Conrad, which won the SF Hugo Award in 1965 (it tied with Frank Herbert’s Dune).
N.B. This is the fourth Zelazny book I’ve read, going back to when I was a pre-teen. The ones under my belt are: To Die in Italbar, Lord of Light, Damnation Alley, and, now, This Immortal. I read Italbar as a kid and re-read it around 1990; I read Lord of Light working the late-night help desk shift for Marriott a decade ago. Both are due for a re-read. Damnation Alley is the workable and definitely better-half of the cheesy 1970s movie of the same name. I also read the superb novella “The Doors of His Eyes, the Lamps of His Mouths” in a bathtub in Maryland. The Guns of Avalon sits on the shelf behind me, awaiting reading.
* What a great name! You know that Dos Equis guy, “the most interesting man in the world”? I don’t know his name, but I know a guy named Don Dos Santos would come as close to the Interesting Man as one could get.
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