Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Roger Zelazny Book Review: To Die in Italbar



When I think of To Die in Italbar, I immediately think of Eye of Cat.

I know that Zelazny considered Eye of Cat among his top five books. He was always reluctant to number his least favorites, but eventually did so with Italbar, calling it his worst novel.

I'm just baffled by the inclusion of each of these books on their respective lists. They're both fine. I personally consider each somewhat below his best work, but neither one is a bad book. In fact, I like Italbar a bit more than Cat. The worst I'll say about it is that it seems like it was taken out of the oven before it was fully cooked. Perhaps his resentment stems from this. I can see areas where it could have been tightened up, and I think it's unique among his works in that it's not the best book it could be. It's the only time he seemed to have declared something "good enough" to be published. It's pointless to speculate. I don't know why he didn't like it. I do.

My current edition is the double feature with a Dark Traveling as the second book. (I also like DT, though it's got some structural problems.)

To Die in Italbar certainly has a great cast of characters, Heidel von Hymack, Malacar Miles, the empathesiac telekineticist John Morwin, and Doctor Pels, the dead doctor, "an exile from the worlds of life." 

Heidel von Hymack, aka H,  the green-eyed saint from the stars, is the man who drives the plot. (And I can't be the the only person to note that Zelazny features a lot of green-eyed characters.) He is host to a Pei'an diety, Arym-o-Myra, goddess of healing and disease. Because of this he is capable of bringing the diseases within his body into balance, allowing him to cure any disease. Unfortunately, the side effect is that when he isn't in balance, he infects those around him with the diseases he carries.

"This 'balance' you speak of," said Helman. "There is no such thing. You speak as if the pathogens formed ranks, warring against one another, and then sign a truce for a time where none of them misbehaves. This is nonsense. The body does not work that way."

Sure they do. Doctors call it the Three Stooges syndrome.


Doctor's Representation


"I know," said Heidel, as they entered the lift. "It's just an analogy. As I said, I'm not a doctor of medicine. I've coined my own simple, pragmatic terms for referring to what occurs to me. Translate them as you would. I'm still the expert on the effects."
   
I really like that exchange. Very Zelazny.

Malacar Miles (I always want to reverse it to Miles Malacar) reminds me extremely strongly of Victor Corgo, Captain of the Happy Wallaby from the Furies. I don't know how far in the future of Isle this book is set, but it seems that Earth goes rather abruptly from being the center of civilization with a thriving bureaucracy to a devastated wasteland.  Part of this seems to be that the book was not originally intended as a sequel to Isle, but had become so when Zelazny needed to "jazz up" the book. A little more effort in describing how it had gotten to the state would have gone a long way.

I always try to go blind into something I think I'll really enjoy and I didn't know that Francis Sandow was in the book until he showed up. I found it a rather nice surprise, as I had recently read Isle of the Dead. And as much as I like Sandow and as much as he contributes to the end of the book, I have to admit that he was shoehorned into the affair rather awkwardly.

The plot. H is a wandering do gooder, who uses his powers to treat otherwise incurable illnesses. However, things go awry in the city of Italbar, where he inadvertently unleashes a plague. A mob turns against him. I like the moment when H breaks. In Jack of Shadows, Zelazny describes Jack as "a wrongfully punished man whose character was twisted by the act." and I think that's a powerful theme that he writes well.

Then came the fury. It was not right that they use him so, he felt. He had come to their town for a humanitarian purpose. He had undergone hardship to reach Italbar. Now he was bleeding on its streets and being cursed. Who were they to judge him as they had done, to call him names and abuse him? This thing rose up within him, and he knew that, had he the power, he would have reached out and crushed them all.

Hatred, that thing nearly unknown to him, suddenly filled his body with cold fire. He wished that he had not undergone catharsis. He would be the plague-bearer, infecting them all.
   
Pels wants to study him as means to a cure for his own condition, Malacar wants to use him as a weapon and Sandow just want him to knock it off.

It's got a lot of those nifty Zelazny touches, like Deiban fever, a disease where cellular fluids go extracellular and the victims get  thirsty but no amount of liquids will help.
 
Malacar running into Jackara seemed just a little too fortunate. How come I never run into hero-worshiping prostitutes when I travel? That said, they do have a nice chemistry. I like this scene. She has a big picture of him over her bed.

He rounded the bed to study the picture more closely.

"That's a good likeness. Where's it from?"


She brightened, followed to stand beside him.


"It was a plate, from your biography by that man Gillian. I had it enlarged and tridized. It is the best picture I have of you."


"I never read the book," he said. "I am trying to remember where the picture was taken, but I can't."


"That was right before the Parameter Eight Maneuver," she said, "when you were preparing the Fourth Fleet to rendezvous with Conlil. It was taken about an hour prior to your departure, according to the book."


He turned and looked down at her, smiling.


"I believe you're correct," he said, and she smiled at this.

I could imagine that really happening. And a little bit later...

"Excuse me," she said, "I never-- I never expected anything like this to happen to me. Malacar to walk into my room and offer to take me away. It is something I have dreamed of . . ."

Heh. "Dear Penthouse, I never thought it would happen to me..."

Ultimately, it's a pretty good book, but it  too often lacks the Zelazny flavor, the clever flourishes in dialogue and description. The pacing is somewhat uneven. We're told of the climax by Shind, Malacar's telepathic lemur. I hate to say it, but parts of it feel like a first draft that should have been revised.

The exception to this is the voice of Arym-o-Myra. She's fun to read.

 Soon you will be able to emanate spores that will slay across hundreds of kilometers. And there will come a day when you will need but set foot upon a world to kill everything which dwells there."     

_It was because you were personally present. You are becoming a focal point. Soon you will be the still center of a cyclone. One day in the near future, there will be nothing able to stand against you. You will need but point your finger and will it and they will die_.


Neat bits abound. Malacar wonders "How many of those bastards in the CL High Command have I outlived? They did not pass out S-S the way we did." Is this a reference to the The Sprung-Samser life extension treatments in This Immortal? It's very unlikely that they take place in the same universe, but I suppose it's possible. Let the fanwankery commence!

Overall? It's good, and with a little more effort, it could have been great. Zelazny disavowed it, but I still think it's a decent read.

7 comments:

  1. First of all I have to wall off your denigrating comments about Eye of Cat, since that's one of my favorite Zelazny novels and I don't want that to affect my comments here; I'll comment on your Eye of Cat review by and by.

    Italbar, for me, is what I call a "split-brain" book: on one hand, I don't think it's very good; on the other hand, I like it.

    I read Italbar in my teens back in the 1970s and completely forgot it. I just reread it again for the first time and I can see why: I think I've mixed it up with several other Zelazny novels, because it's a bit of a mash-up. Malacar Miles is a variant of Conrad Nomikos; Jackara reminds me of Diane (Red Wig); Morwin the empath tele-sculptor reminds me of Render; and the whole Sandow tie-in just muddies the waters further.

    I think this was the quickest Zelazny novel I've ever read through; I blasted through it in a couple of evenings. It was fun -- but --

    None of the pieces really seem to fit together. The characters' motivations often seemed forced and overblown. Having H turn out to be possessed by a Pei'an deity eviscerates the core of the story, since it turns out he was nothing but a pawn all along; he doesn't need to confront the full horror of his actions because he wasn't responsible for them. Pels was interesting but didn't really amount to much (and if he'd been completely cut out of the book I don't think it would have been any different).

    Shind is also disturbingly familiar, though I can't say why; she somehow puts me in mind of Doorways in the Sand (a later book of course). I like her a lot, though.

    Presumably Italbar is set long after Isle of the Dead -- at least decades later -- after Malacar's war led to the destruction of Earth. And tying it in to This Immortal (with the mention of the S-S treatments) seems questionable at best (and where was Conrad, then? Not so immortal after all?) . . . maybe Zelazny was slyly sneaking in his own "future history," under the radar?

    Anyway. All in all, I enjoyed Italbar but consider it third-rank Zelazny.

    --Chris ("Sluggishly Sloshed") DeVito

    ReplyDelete
  2. Chris: Italbar, for me, is what I call a "split-brain" book: on one hand, I don't think it's very good; on the other hand, I like it.

    Yeah, I'll more or less agree with that. On the page where I give everything a letter grade, I gave Italbar a C.

    Chris: None of the pieces really seem to fit together.

    I think that's another fair cop. I thought they "fit", but only because they were forced into place. And I think your comment that Pels could have been removed without affecting the story was spot on.

    Chris: Having H turn out to be possessed by a Pei'an deity eviscerates the core of the story, since it turns out he was nothing but a pawn all along; he doesn't need to confront the full horror of his actions because he wasn't responsible for them

    That's actually the crux of my dislike of Hell Tanner. He gets all the cred of being a badass biker, but suffers none of the consequences.

    Chris: And tying it in to This Immortal (with the mention of the S-S treatments) seems questionable at best (and where was Conrad, then? Not so immortal after all?)

    If I had to make a guess, I don't think it's really a tie in to This Immortal; I think he was just plagiarizing himself, consciously or unconsciously, and it's a throwaway line to which we shouldn't give too much weight.

    If you're really going to force me to defend my thesis, I'd say that Conrad was doing whatever he was doing when he also failed to appear in Damnation Alley. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. JJ: I thought they "fit", but only because they were forced into place.

    CD: A square peg can be "fit" into a round hole, if you have a big enough hammer and pound hard enough -- but the results won't be pretty.

    JJ: Hell Tanner. [...] gets all the cred of being a badass biker, but suffers none of the consequences.

    CD: I'm not sure what consequences you feel he should suffer. He's spent a good part of his life in jail; are you referring to something else?

    JJ: If you're really going to force me to defend my thesis, I'd say that Conrad was doing whatever he was doing when he also failed to appear in Damnation Alley. :)

    CD: Conrad hadn't been born yet when Damnation Alley took place, or if he had been, he was very young and living in Greece. (Conrad said that his parents had survived the nuclear war -- the Three Days or Big Raid or whatever.) So, no overlap there. (And don't even get me started on my theory that Hell could, somehow, have been Conrad's father...)

    --Chris DeVito

    ReplyDelete
  4. CD: I'm not sure what consequences you feel he should suffer. He's spent a good part of his life in jail; are you referring to something else?

    You've read the book more recently and with greater attention to detail than I did, but to the best of my recollection, the only crime of his for which we're explicitly told he is serving time is the A.D.W. that kept him safe from the Big Raid. Hell's dialogue with Denton makes it clear that he's committed other crimes as well.

    "This says that if I make it to Boston I receive a full pardon for every criminal action I've ever committed within the nation of California . . ."

    "That's right."

    "Does that include ones you might not know about now, if someone should come up with them later?"

    Part of this is after-the-fact justification on my part. I don't like the character, so I'm looking for reasons to justify that dislike. He got lucky when he sat out the Big Raid and got lucky again that circumstances conspired to offer him a pardon for crimes grievous enough to warrant a life sentence.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Well, we've gone from Italbar to Hell Tanner's shortcomings, an unlikely transition at best. I think we've covered Hell pretty well in the comments to your Damnation Alley review. All I'd add here is that -- well, life's a bitch; sometimes good things happen to bad people. Sucks, but there it is.

    --Chris DeVito

    ReplyDelete
  6. Just finished reading To Die in Italbar for the first time, so I figured I'd stop by and join the discussion (a year late).

    First off, I'll agree with what's been said about Dr. Pels: throughout the entire book, I was waiting for him to do something significant. It seemed like all these different characters were converging on a single point, and it was only a matter of time before he made his contribution. Then, in the end, I felt like he didn't need to be a part of the story at all. Kind of disappointing.

    As far as Heidel being possessed by a deity goes, though, I'll actually be the odd guy out and say I liked it. And I say that because I was NOT convinced by his sudden turn to evil.

    Early in the book, we'd established the fact that Heidel WANTED to be a good guy: he wanted to help people, and he felt like crap for hurting people. Then, a town turns on him, and he decides that all of humanity should suffer for it.

    Don't get me wrong: I totally would have believed that he'd attack the town that turned on him. I could understand that he'd want revenge after he'd come there to help and they'd beaten him within an inch of death. What I DIDN'T believe was that he would attribute his hatred to ALL of humanity, after we'd already established that he was trying to be a helpful guy.

    So, this sat wrong with me for a while, but was made better by the fact that the Pei'an deity took over full control of Heidel and started calling all the shots. That, to me, offered sufficient explanation for why he went from good guy to "MUST KILL EVERYONE."

    My major complaint about the book is that I think the resolution would suck for anyone who hasn't read Isle of the Dead. It seems like the ratio of Sandow's importance to his development was way too high. I mean, he came in there and essentially resolved the plot by himself, and yet, if you haven't read Isle of the Dead, you just don't know enough about him to know why this should have been the case.

    All that being said, I actually quite enjoyed To Die in Italbar. I liked that there were so many characters, because I KNEW they were all going to come together at some point, I just didn't know HOW it would happen. Granted, there was some disappointment in how it all went down (Dr. Pels, I'm looking at YOU), but I still had fun along the way.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I've always enjoyed To Die in Italbar, I think its because Malacar Miles endeared himself to me with the quote

    "Whenever people start talking to me about my own good, I reach for my gun"

    Which speaks to me. Is it an optimized work that lives up to the fullest of its potential? Probably not. It feels like there was much more that could have been done with it. but am I dissapointed in what we got? No, I cant say that I am.

    ReplyDelete