© 1981 by Robert
Silverberg
The best thing
about being an avid book-o-phile is when your current read sneaks up on you
unexpectedly, bangs you over the head, and shang-hais you to a wondrous and
fantastical, fully-fleshed out new world.
This happened to
me reading Robert Silverberg’s The
Majipoor Chronicles.
Quick
background: sometime in the late 80s I used to spend my weeklong summer
vacations from the job at my parents’ weekend home just outside Lake George , NY
So in late 2011
I stumbled upon The Majipoor Chronicles in
a used book bin and, hesitating, probably from both guilt and unease at the
investment that may be required, I purchased it. It sat on the On-Deck Circle behind me for
nearly three years before I cracked it open.
And read its
eleven tales in five days – morning, afternoon, evening, any time I could
snatch fifteen or twenty minutes to explore its pages.
What an awesome
read!
Majipoor truly
comes alive – and it is a wonderful world.
Dangerous, yes, amoral, often, but so lifelike and real, more real to me
than, say, Australia or China or the African continent. I loved my five day trip so much I have
picked up the long-lost Lord Valentine’s
Castle and plan on reading that next.
The frame of the
book is a boy, Hissune, at liberty in a vast catacomb of recorded images /
thoughts / lives. He samples one –
literally becoming one with the subject – and quickly becomes addicted,
sampling the lives of other Majipooreans from various epochs and eras, lands,
and social classes. After eleven such
delvings into quite extraordinary lives, something special happens to him at
the end.
Three tales
stand out to me – “In the Fifth Year of the Voyage”, “The Desert of Stolen
Dreams”, and “The Soul-Painter and the Shapeshifter.” But all contain that essential nugget to any
successful short story, that ratchet of conflict, conflict you can feel deep in
your solar plexus between characters as lifelike as those you sat next to at
your last family gathering. “Crime and
Punishment” and “The Thief of Ni-Moya” stand out especially in this
regard. Even the two bottom-rung stories
(if I was to rank all eleven) still work as vehicles to pull you in to the vast
history of this world.
There are some
minor bits of discomfort in terms of sexual situations, but nothing worse than what
you’d see on prime-time teevee. Other
than that, I really can’t find fault with the novel. Silverberg’s a great writer who I’ve been
reading since I was ten or so (Conquerors
from the Darkness) and definitely need to investigate more fully.
My tally of
grades for the eleven stories came to an A-minus. So The
Majipoor Chronicles is an example where the whole is greater than the sum
of its parts.
Grade: A+
PS – Major bonus
points for the five maps at the beginning of the book – perfect!
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