Roger Zelazny Book Review: Deus Irae

We continue our tour of Roger Zelazny post-apocolypsia with Deus Irea Irae.  I think it was the third Zelazny book I ever read, after Roadmarks and Creatures of Light and Darkness.

I had a PDF of the book open on the computer when my wife walked past.

"Is that a name?" she asked.

"No, it's the title of the book. It's actually a rather clever play on words. Dies Irae is a the most well known musical sequence in Catholic Requiems. Deus Irae means God of Wrath. Do you care?"

"Not even a little bit. Have fun writing your blog."

I don't especially like the book, to be entirely honest. (Though the cover, as disturbing as it is, is fantastically evocative and probably my favorite Zelazny cover art)  It's Philip K. Dick book! Now it's a Roger Zelazny book! Now it's a Phil Dick book again! Each author has a very distinctive style, and the shifts in tone remind me of a campfire story where one speaker gets to the chapter break and then passes control to the next person in line.

It's the story of an armless, legless painter named Tibor McMasters. (He paints using U.S. ICBM extensor system) He's going on a Pilg (Pilgrimage) to find Carleton Lufteufel in order to paint a murch. (Church mural) (Mercifully, they stop introducing these type of words after the first couple chapters)

Carleton Lufteufel, the Deus Irae, is another great name,

"Carleton Lufteufel," Father Handy said, "was Chairman of the Energy Research and Development Administration from 1982 to the beginning of the war." He spoke half to himself. "To the use of the gob." The great objectless bomb, a bomb which detonated not at one particular spot on the Earth's surface but which acted so as to contaminate a layer of the atmosphere itself. It therefore (and this was the sort of weapons-theorizing that had gone on prior to World War Three) could not be headed off, as a missile could be by an antimissile, or a manned bomber, no matter how fast -- and they had gone quite fast, by 1982 -- by, incredibly, a biplane. A slow biplane.

The setting reminds me of the Gunslinger. The first printing of the Gunslinger and Drawing were cool because they gave the impression of a world that had developed differently than ours, rather than a bog standard post apocalypse society, of which there already were a million.

Here! The black-spotted cow drawing the bicycle cart. In the center of the cart. And at the doorway of the sacristy Father Handy glanced against the morning sunlight from Wyoming to the north as if the sun came from that direction, saw the church's employee, the limbless trunk with knobbed head lolling as if in trip-fantastic to a slow jig as the Holstein cow wallowed forward.

Interestingly, Salt Lake City was mentioned here as well as in Damnation Alley. (I only remembered this because I came across a review speculating that Tanner might come from a Mormon family.

Collected Works has some interesting stories about it, but as the only people who read this blog either read it or wrote it, there is little point in rehashing them here.  (Also, I see they're on the Wikipedia page)

It had been a while since I read the book (probably a good ten years) and certain disturbing passages and the prolonged sequence where Lufteufel gruesomely cuts the shrapnel out of his head were the only things I remembered.

Disturbing passage one:

No; he had his own favorite, and, although it had killed only a relatively few million people, it impressed him: its evil was so blatant; it glowed and stank, as a U.S. Congressman had once said, like a dead mackerel in the night's dark. And it, like the gob, was a U.S. weapon. It was a nerve gas.

It caused the organs of the body to eat one another.

Disturbing passage two:

The bird cackled, "Let me tell you the best I've ever seen, in all the places I've ever been. It consists of an external brain which is carried in a bucket or jar, still functioning, with a dense Saran Wrap to protect it from the atmosphere and to keep the blood from draining off. And the owner had to constantly watch it, to see if it hadn't been dealt a traumatic jolt. That one lived indefinitely, but his whole life was spent in --"

Wikipedia tells me that Phil Dick initially went to college as a German major. I can't say I'm terribly surprised, since he sticks a bunch of German words everywhere. Apparently Zelazny noticed too:

Pete, his forehead wrinkling, said slowly, "I saw once what's called der Todesstachel. At least that's what your buddy Father Handy and that inc Tibor would call it; they like those German theological terms."

Heh.  He likes German words like Roger Zelazny likes "arroyo".

Dr. Abernathy says to Tibor: "A legless man cannot kneel."

I don't think of "Who gave you that Jesuitical bit of knowledge?" without thinking of David Fentris in Home is the Hangman, who employs a similar turn of phrase.

"A mirror! I need a mirror! Get the little one on top of the john and bring it to me! Hurry!"

"Mirror?"

"Looking-glass! Spiegel! Reflector! The thing you see yourself in!"

I'm just guessing, but I think Dick probably wrote that.

The Big C was neat, it was a malfunctioning pre-Smash computer that  waylays passersby and breaks them down in order to continue its existence. This reminded me of  the stone from Jack of Shadows.

Huh. The Great C says to Pete. "Well, as Oscar Wilde put it, 'Each man kills the thing he loves." I didn't know that was Wilde. I thought, of course, of Yama's line to Mara at the beginning of Lord of Light. He was obviously quoting someone, but I didn't know the providence of that quote.

They eventually encounter Carleton Lufteufel in the most transparent disguise ever, going under the name Jack Schuld, Shuld is German for debt. I kind of like that, as Lufteufel is trying to make amends for his crimes.

Overall, it has some elements that I like, but it's just so relentlessly grim that I didn't enjoy it.  "There are no heroes in Dick's books", Ursula K. Le Guin wrote and that about sums it up. Everybody's just kind of an asshole.