Roger Zelazny Book Review: Eye of Cat

Today's Roger Zelazny commentary will be even more meandering than most.

Eye of Cat is the story of a Navajo man, William Blackhorse Singer, who is filled with such malaise that he no longer wishes to live.

After reading Eye of Cat, I understand exactly how he feels.

It reminds me of a tale from a website I used to read regularly, Fametracker's Fame Audit.

Once upon a time, a friend of mine named David was living at the home of parents of another friend of ours, for the summer, because he was living in Toronto, because he was working at a huge theme park called Canada's Wonderland, because he was singing and dancing in a musical revue called "Hot Hits." And so he spent that summer singing and dancing and sleeping and eating and hanging out at the home of parents of another friend of ours, at which also lived the grandmother of the other friend of ours, who was Hungarian and known as Oma. And Oma wasn't quite clear on exactly what David was doing at the house, or what a "Hot Hit" is, or who David even was exactly, and why he kept sitting on the couch watching TV and eating yogurt. So one day she came into the living room while he was sitting on the couch watching TV and eating yogurt and asked, in her high-pitched, Hungarian-accented voice, to no one in particular, and with a philosophical clarity and succinctness that would have done Sartre proud:

"Why is David?"

I always thought that was a clever bit of writing, and now I ask the question:

"Why is Eye of Cat?"

Okay, that was a bit harsh. The truth of the matter is that I don't really care much about Eye of Cat one way or the other. It's fine. The cover art is neat. I would file it away with Today we Choose Faces as one of the works for which I bear neither animus nor affection, if people would just shut up about it.

Confession: I don't like Joss Wedon's Firefly. Not that I think it's terrible; it's just your basic middle of the road sci-fi show, but its pedigree and the circumstances of its cancellation have elevated it to the status of sacred martyr and the wailing and gnashing of teeth that began when it was yanked in 2002 have not even begun to subside. I was largely indifferent to it at first and slowly grew to dislike it every time somebody mentioned it as a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. I feel the same way about Eye of Cat.

Eye of Cat is not terrible, like A Farce to be Reckoned With. It's not brilliant, like Lord of Light. It's just kind of there. And yet, Zelazny devotes an essay in Frost & Fire to the techniques used in the story.

I'm capable of making the distinction between something that I don't like and something I think is really and truly objectively bad. I do think that Eye of Cat does fall into the former category. I find it difficult to put my finger on why I don't like this story. Part of it is that it strikes me as over-hyped, as I encountered Zelazny's essay (Constructing a Science Fiction Novel) on how awesome the book was before I read the book itself, and I was let down when I did finally get a hold of a copy.

There were certainly good elements to it. Billy seems like a cool cat (no pun intended). I like the way Zelazny describes his outfit:

He  wears  a  blue  velveteen  shirt  hanging out  over his jeans, a wide concha belt securing it at  his waist.  A heavy squash  blossom  necklace  -  a  very  old  one -  hangs down upon his breast. High about his neck is  a slender  strand of turquoise heiche. He has a silver bracelet on his left wrist, studded  with  random  chunks  of  turquoise  and  coral. The buttons  of  his  shirt  are  hammered  dimes from  the early twentieth century. His long hair is bound with a strip of red cloth.

That's really pretty cool. I think it's the dimes that make me love it.

I was listening to the audio book and the bird whistles during Zelazny's opening narration really add an additional element to it. He pronounces coyotes  "kigh-ho-tays" whereas I always say "kigh-yo-tees". I'm sure his pronunciation is correct, but I'm so accustomed to hearing it the wrong way that the right way sounds funny to me.

The narrative is interspersed with various "myth interludes". One of them includes this passage: "But this also was a place of suffering, of misery, a thing Coyote discovered as he went  to and fro in the world and up and down it."

The same phrase appears almost verbatim in The Changing Land. (When asked of what he would do with the power in Castle Timeless, the man identifying himself as Weleand says "...I would go up and down in the world and to and fro in it, putting down injustices and rewarding virtue...")

A little research shows me that it's from Job 1:7.

And Jehovah said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered Jehovah, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.

That's interesting. I don't think I've ever encountered the phrase other than in these two works. I know that Zelazny was raised Catholic, but had stopped identifying as a member of any organized religion by the time of his death. I don't think it's coincidence that such a specific phrase appears twice (though I suppose it's possible that it is, as in any large body of work, you'll eventually have similar phrases appearing), but I have no idea what it might signify. It might even be as simple as the fact that he liked the sound of it.

On my first read-through, I didn't like how heavily emphasized Billy's heritage was. I kind of snarked about this kind of thing when I covered Lord Demon, where I observed that I have Asian friends who sometimes get through entire conversations without mentioning Sun-Tzu or Confucius. It just seemed that Billy didn't have any traits that weren't wrapped up in him being a Navajo.

On reflection, though, I think it's a particularly clever bit of story-telling. Billy is lost. He's looking for his place in this modern world, and not finding it, he reverts to the identity held in his youth.

For instance, I liked this,

"You  are  an  expert  on the  pursuit and capture of exotic life forms.  You spent most of your life doing it. You practically  stocked the Interstellar Life Institute single-handed, You -"

 Billy waved his hand.

"Enough," he said. "The alien you are talking about is an intelligent  being. I  spent much  of my life tracking animals - exotic  ones,  to  be  sure,  some  very  crafty  and  with tricky behavior  patterns  -  but  animals  nevertheless,  not creatures capable of elaborate planning."

Billy reminded me of Joseph Makatozi is Louis L'Amour's Last of the Breed. Like Billy, Makatozi is an American Indian who has received advanced training in the modern world, but when he is shot down over Russia during the Cold War, he eschews that training and falls back on the lessons of his youth to escape his captors and survive the bitter Siberian winter. With both characters, the man who fits into civilization is simply a veneer, and I think that could possibly be offensive if not handled well, but both writers execute it quite deftly.

I found Makatozi a lot more appealing than Billy, not in the least because Billy is afflicted with such ennui, and that's a hard trait to sell if you want people interested in your protagonist, no matter how talented a writer you are.

Anyway, William Blackhorse Singer is called out of retirement to help protect an alien ambassador. To do so, he frees an alien he had captured, the eponymous "Cat" of the title. Cat's price for its assistance is Billy's life. Since Billy wasn't really using it for anything anyway, he agrees.

This plan always makes me think of a scene in the movie version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The movie has a complicated plot, but the gist of it is that one thousand years ago, human civilization was all but wiped out in the Seven Days of Fire by the God Warriors, huge bio-engineered monsters. The plot is set in motion when one of the big empires unearths a God Warrior embryo at an archeological dig.

At the point in the movie where this scene takes place, Nausicaä's people have a tenuous alliance with the people who invaded their village, because if they can't stop an approaching herd of Ohmu, then everyone there is going to die. The Ohmu are hundred-ton pillbugs, the biological equivalent of the Imperial Walkers from The Empire Strikes Back and their herd numbers in the thousands.

In order to stop the stampede, the invaders roll out the newborn God Warrior, whose growth they forceably accelerated so they could use it as a living weapon. We never get an exact head count for the number of God Warriors it took to extinguish humanity, but I get the impression that there were fewer than twenty of them. They move by bending space around them and fire radiotoxic lasers (I'm told the Japanese words used for the beams in the comic are 'poison light'). They are these horrifying, uncontrollable monsters. I love this plan because it's a swallowing-the-spider-to-catch-the-fly solution that's going to cause more problems than it solves, and the whole time they're doing it they've got this attitude like "Relax, we've got this covered."

For such a long review, I'm not really doing a huge amount of talking about the book. To return to the actual commentary, Billy's bargain with Cat strikes me as a similar thing.  It's not like Billy is oblivious to the danger Cat represents, but he really just doesn't care if he lives or dies, so he makes the deal. Cat stops the assassin, and then begins hunting Billy, who gains the assistance of a group of human psychics along the way. That's pretty much the whole story.  (If you're playing the Roger Zelany Drinking Game at home, "arroyo" only shows up four times. I'm rather amazed.)

Here's an excerpt that touches on some on what I think are the problems with the story:

"If  you  want  to  call  it that,"  he replied.  "He's gone around  the  bend.  He's...  somewhere  else.  His mind is running everything through a filter of primitive symbolism. I can't understand him, and  I'm sure  he can't  understand me. He thinks he's deep under the  earth, traveling  along some ancient path."

"He is,"  Ironbear  said. "He is walking the way of the shaman."

Fisher snorted.

"What do you know about it?"

"Enough  to  understand  some," he  answered. "I  got interested  in Indian  things again  when my father died. I even remembered some stuff I'd forgotten for a long time.  For all of his education and  travels, Singer  doesn't think  in completely modern terms. In fact, he doesn't  even think  like a modern Indian. He grew up in almost the last possible period and place where  someone could  live in  something close  to a neolithic environment. So he's been to the  stars. A part of him's  always been  back in  those crazy canyons. And  he was a shaman - a real one - once. He set out several days  ago to go back  to that  part of himself, intentionally, because he thought it might help him. Now it's got hold of him, after all those years of repression,  and  it's coming  back  with a vengeance. That's  what I  think. I've  been reading  tapes on the  Navajos  ever  since  I  learned  about him,  in all of my spare moments here.  They're a lot different  from  other Indians, even from their neighbors. But they do  have certain things  in  common  with  the rest  of us  - and  the shaman's journey often  goes underground when things are really tough."

I bolded the part that I think is important. In the essay I referenced above, Zelazny mentions how the Navajo created their own words for parts of an internal combustion engine rather than adopting the English words for them. The Collected Works of Roger Zelazny has an account of how much research he did for this book, and it seems like he just didn't want any of it to go to waste, and I think that's the core of my dislike for the book.

It's fairly well known among Zelazny fans that he wrote a short vignette having nothing to do with the story for his major characters, just as a way to give the character life beyond his immediate circumstances. These set pieces were just for his personal reference and enlightenment and only one of them was every published (Dismal Light, a Francis Sandow story). I always admired that restraint, but it seemed to go out the window here. And I don't want to be one of those Zelazny fans who rag on his later works (Donnerjack happens to be one of my very favorites, for instance), but I think that in he had reigned in his enthusiasm for the topic of the Navajo, I would have found it more appealing. Eye of Cat is unique in its relation to me in that it's the only time Zelazny's excitement for something failed to infect me.

I'll try to end on a positive note, so I'll say that I really enjoyed the poem that ended the book, especially the last three stanzas.

Coyote call across the darkness bar...
I have eaten myself and grown strong.
There is beauty all around me.
Before me, behind me, to the right
and to the left of me,
corn pollen and rainbow.
The white medicine lifts me in his hand.

The dancer at the heart of all things
turns like a dust-devil before me.
My lightning-bead is shattered.
I have spoken my own laws.

My only enemy, my self, reborn,
is also the dancer.
My trail, my mind, is filled with stars
in the great wheel of their turning
toward springtime. Stars.
I come like the rain with the wind
and all growing things.
The white medicine lifts me in his hand.
Here at lost Lukachakai I say this:
The hunting never ends.
The way is beauty.
The medicine is strong.
The ghost train doesn't stop here
anymore. I am the hunter
in the eye of the hunted. If I call
they will come to me
out of Darkness Mountain.