Roger Zelazny Book Review: Coils

 

This piece has more spoilers than usual for my commentaries, so read further at your own peril.

I don't read a huge amount of fiction any more, but I still like Fred Saberhagen. I discovered him at about the same time I did Zelazny, and while I tend to prefer his SF over his fantasy, both are pretty good. I'm a particular fan of his berserker books. I think, other than Neil Gaiman, he's the only other author about whom I had written regularly at my old blog. I remember being vaguely happy when I read Loki 7281, which implied that Zelazny and Saberhagen were friends, and I was overjoyed to read Coils, the first of their two collaborations.

I picked my copy up in the town of Hay-on-Wye in Wales, when my wife and I were vacationing for the 5th year anniversary of our marriage. It's a town full of book stores. It's awesome.  I've got the UK edition of Coils, but it's probably about the same as the US version with the exception of a bunch of extras "u"'s where they don't belong. I usually snag the cover art off Amazon for these reviews, but I had to scan in my copy of the book for this one. Yay, my small contribution to the field of Zelazny studies!

Our hero is Donald BelPatri (which is not actually his real name, but that's what he's called throughout most of the book, so that's what I'm going to use) and lives a carefree life on a houseboat. He gets a monthly stipend about which he is curiously incurious, until his girlfriend pushes him into looking into his past.

The story moves briskly. I kept thinking back to The Naked Matador, probably because they both involve houseboats.

Don's girlfriend (a teacher) is kidnapped and her kidnappers leave a Dear John note in her name on the computer:

DON - WHAT WITH ONE THING AND ANOTHER, TIME THAT I MOVED ON. ITS BEEN GREAT SUMMER FUN BUT WE SHOULDNT TRY TO MAKE ANYTHING MORE OF IT.
YOUR'S IN MEMORY, CORA

Turn to page 47 to see how Encyclopedia Brown knew that an English teacher didn't write that note!

Also, I'm not buying it. If there is anything the internet has taught me, it's that English teachers are as sloppy as anyone else in their personal correspondence.

He eventually discovers that he was one of a team of psychics working for Angra Energy. He was a human-to-machine telepath, Ann Strong was a more traditional human-to-human one, Mercy was a telekinetic and Willy Boy was just plain awesome. But more on him in a minute. The characters are all interesting and each is kind of pathetic in his or her own way.

Willy Boy is great. I think he's the only time that a villain eclipsed the hero in a Zelazny work. Don BelPatri is a serviceable hero, an amnesiac super human straight out Zelazny Central Casting but Willy Boy! Man, I loved him!

A gray man, in some indeterminate region of middle age. He had grown bushy sideburns and acquired a wide network of broken veins across his wide nose since I had last seen him. He was a bit fleshier now, with the pouches under his bright blue eyes more pronounced.

"Willy Boy," I said.

Zelazny seldom uses "talkisms" other than said, but he doesn't need to. I can almost hear Don's delivery, low and flat, equal parts menace and dread.

"Well, bless me! If it isn't Mr. Don Bell-Patri!" he said, in that magical voice, clear and almost musical.

That voice had once been nationally famous. The words were always clearly enunciated; the accent varied, seeming at different times to come from all parts of the South. He'd shouted the Gospel at tent audiences and then auditorium audiences and finally at millions watching him on television.There were healings and hollerings, and then there had been the story of the teen-aged girl in Mississippi - her abortion, her attempted suicide...Willy Boy's stock had plummeted. In the end, there had been no legal charges, but for the past several years, the faithful had been denied his version of the Lord. Willy Boy's profile had flattened on the graph of public awareness. But there was still something special about him. It involved the healings.  They had been real.

He seemed to exhale evil now, along with a faint odor of bourbon. And in a way, I was glad of this, because it meant that I had not been wrong, that I was not crazy and that what was happening was not yet over.

...

There had been a night, long ago when I had gone with Willie Boy to his apartment and spent an evening lowering the level in a jug of very smooth white lightning. Incongruously, for what he did in those days, there was still an opened Bible in plain sight, on a small table by the window. Curious, when he was out of the room, I had gone over. It was opened to Psalm 109, which was almost entirely underlined.

If you're curious, Psalm 109 is a a cry for vengeance, where the speaker beseeches God to punish his enemies.

Hold not thy peace, O God of my praise;
 for the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful are opened against me:
       
they have spoken against me with a lying tongue.
 They compassed me about also with words of hatred;
       
and fought against me without a cause.
 For my love they are my adversaries:
       
but I give myself unto prayer.
And they have rewarded me evil for good,
       
and hatred for my love.
 Set thou a wicked man over him:
       
and let Satan stand at his right hand.
 When he shall be judged, let him be condemned:
       
and let his prayer become sin.
 Let his days be few;
       
and let another take his office.
 Let his children be fatherless,
       
and his wife a widow.
 Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg:
       
let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.

And it goes on like that. Again, I have to admire Zelazny's restraint. I didn't know what Psalm 109 was without looking it up. I doubt there is huge overlap between people who would and people who would read Coils. But there it is, unexplained.

Zelazny said in the introduction to Passion Play in the Last Defender of Camelot: "I had gathered together all of my rejected stories and spent an evening reading through them to see whether I could determine what I was doing wrong. One thing struck me about all of them: I was overexplaining. I was describing settings, events and character motivations in too much detail. I decided, in viewing these stories now that they had grown cold, that I would find it insulting to have anyone explain anything to me at that length. I resolved thereafter to treat the reader as I would be treated myself, to avoid the unnecessarily explicit, to use more indirection with respect to character and motivation, to draw myself up short whenever I felt the tendency to go on talking once a thing had been shown."

Back to Don and Willy Boy:

Later, when we were both several sheets to the wind, I had asked him about his preaching days.

"How much of that was hype? Did you really believe any of the things you said?"

We lowered his glass and raised his eyes. He fixed me with that acetylene blueness which had come over so well on the tube.

"I believed," he said simply. "So help me, when I started I was full of the fire of the Lord. I wanted their souls for Him. I believed. I hollered and gave 'em Scripture and waved the Good Book. I was as good as Billy Graham, Rex Humbard - any of 'em! Better, even! When I prayed for healing and saw 'em throw down their crutches and walk, or see again, or stop hurting, I knew the grace of the Lord was on me, and I believed and there was no hype." His eyes drifted away from me. "Then one day I got mad at a newsman," he went on, slowly. "I kept tellling him to move back, he was getting in my way. He wouldn't do it. 'Damn you, then!' I thought. 'Drop dead, you miserable bastard!' " He paused again. "And he did," he finally said. "Just keeled over and lay there. The doctor said it was a heart attack. But he was young and healthy-looking and I knew what I'd said in my heart. And then I thought about it. Thought about it a lot. Now the Lord wouldn't go in for His servant pulling that sort of thing, would He? The healing, yeah - if it was helping to get a bunch of 'em saved. But killing 'em? I started thinking, maybe the power didn't come from the Lord. Maybe it was just something I could do by myself, either way.Maybe He didn't care one way or the other if I was preaching or not preaching. It wasn't the Holy Spirit moving through me, healing. It was just something about me that could cure 'em or kill 'em. I started drinking around then and fornicating and and all the rest. That's when it got to be hype and makeup and TV cameras and people planted in the audience with fake testimonies...I didn't believe anymore. There's just us and animals and plants and rocks. There ain't no more. The best thing a man can do is get a hold of all the good things in a hurry, 'cause time's passing fast. There's no God. Or if there is, He don't like me anymore."

He is "a reverse faith healer with no faith" who hates himself and he took it out on other people. He's an evil televangelist (yes, yes, the jokes write themselves), but unlike Jim Bakker, he can kill you with his brain. ("Apology accepted, Captain BelPatri.")

I don't know where he comes from. He's not really a character I think Zelazny would have written by himself, but nor does he strike me as a particularly Saberhagen-esque creation. I think it's great that the two of them combined to bring forth something that neither would make on his own.

Don (whose real name is Stephenson McFarland) remembers how he came to the state he was in the at the beginning of the book. He raised concerns about the tasks he was asked to do for his employer, and things escalated. The other paranorms try to persuade him to see reason, but he refuses to keep working for the company. I like Willy Boy's pitch:

 "..Forget about what you might think are right and wrong. You're on the winning side. You can write your own ticket, not skitter around like a hog on ice. If you still feel bad ten years from now, when you're really on top, that'll be the time to repent. You'll be in a position for all kinds of good works to ease your conscience. I know all about consciences..."

I shook my head.

"I just don't see it that way."

He sighed. He shrugged.

"All righty. I can tell the Boss I tried. Want a drink?"

Finally Creighton Barbeau, chairman of the board of Angra Energy gives him a choice. He can either die, or consent to having his memories erased and then receiving a generous stipend while living on a houseboat in Florida. Don plays against type for a Zelazny character and rather than spitting into the flames and biting the hand of the executioner, he says "You may have a point there..."

I momentarily thought of the narrator in Love is an Imaginary Number as he rages against "The peace of the eunuch; the peace of lobotomy, lotus and Thorazine." If they'd just thought to offer him a boat, things would have gone so much better.

I assumed that Saberhagen named Creighton Barbeau, because that strikes me as such an un-Zelazny-like name, but a little research shows me that Creighton and Barbeau were both names of Canadian folklorists. While the name is rather more florid than Zelazny's norm, it's possible he was making some kind of reference here and it simply went over my head. Or maybe it was Saberhagen. I really don't know.

Don continues to look for Cora and the book drags a little in the middle. He runs into an arroyo on page 135 of the paperback. (You know, the arroyo thing started as a joke, and now this blog is the number one result on Google for Zelazny and arroyo)  There are some neat elements. I like how he falls asleep in a car and dreams about an accident, and the car he is controlling with his talent begins psychosomatically taking on the traits of the car ruined in that accident.

Ann Strong, the telepath sides with Don in his quest, and Barbeau sends Willy Boy to kill her. She contacts Don telepathically, and he coils inside the electronics of her home, and together they try to fight off the preacher. But Ann is having a heart attack and Don isn't there, so they are unsuccessful, though Don momentarily distracts him by turning on the television to a program of one of Willy Boy's proteges. It's another really well done scene. 

After that, Don goes to find Cora. And he does. But first he plays some checkers. I'm not sure what was going on with Catlum, but that scene went on for ten pages, so it had to mean something.

And then he finds Cora. I like when he meets us with Willy Boy in person at the end. Willy Boy can stop Don's heart, but Don can stop Willy Boy's pacemaker. Heh. And their resolution is pretty neat too.

Overall, I thought it was a good SF novel raised up to something special by the presence of a unique and compelling character.