Roger Zelazny Book Review: Donnerjack, part four: Verité

There is quite a bit of story left, but it all moves very briskly once our two protagonists are all grown up. They meet, they part ways, Jay keeps his father's bargain and all the separate threads are pulled together very neatly.

One of the things I like is that it is mentioned that the gods move slowly. In another work, that line would just be flavor, something mentioned to establish their character and quickly forgotten. But it takes them about twenty years to go from gathering their forces to open warfare (something that only works because of the generation sweep of the book) and I'm pleased that this glacial pace was something we got to see and not just hear described. Likewise, I enjoyed the depiction of the long game. Too often in popular fiction, long-term planning is simply magical, with the character in the Saw movies (for instance) predicting and planning around incredibly specific events several years after his death. Death has a general idea of the category of enemy that will be opposing him, and rather than make specific plans, he recruits an agent who can act in ways he cannot.

(Also, it's weird that Zelazny wrote two "Death takes a protégé" stories (Donnerjack and Godson) as it's not the most crowded field, but each of them manages to be entertaining and engaging in entirely different ways)

Another thing that I like is that authors never forget that Virtù is an artificial world. They manage to blend the mythic and the mechanical in a way that makes them both seem magical. When discussing ailments, Ambry observes that "reproduction proges are as old as the first simple copy programs." Skyga, Earthma and Seaga are the greatest gods on Mount Meru, but they are also programs. (I like that Seaga manifests in the form of a cuttlefish colored "as blue as a jazz musician's soul".) Skyga oversees the general power of the system's structure. Earthma is the aion of all aions, the base program for all loci. Seaga's domain is the vast tidal masses of data in Virtu. In order to destroy a proge, one must obliterate it utterly or create a new memory so powerful that it overwrites the existing one.

If I had to pick something I disliked about the book, it would be Alice Hazzard. Alice comes as close as possible to destroying Donnerjack. She's 16 years old,  but already an accomplished muckracker. (Her pseudonym comes from Lincoln Steffens) She reminds me of another muckraker with something of a gap between how is written and how he is perceived:  Buck Williams: "Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time!"

Anyway, here's how the GIRAT reported, firsthand, from the scene of an all-out nuclear surprise attack:

To say the Israelis were caught off guard, Cameron Williams had written, was like saying the Great Wall of China was long.

Just remember, when L&J discuss good writing, this is what they mean.

That's from the slactivist's excellent ongoing takedown of the Left Behind series. Alice is a poor man's Buck. She manages to produce prose both purple and banal. She has such a tin ear it came to life and helped Dorothy find the Wizard.

On the other hand, Alice does have believable interactions with her mom.  Maybe Lindskold was responsible for them and, maybe not, but Zelazny was never great with his depiction of women, and, as shitty a character as Alice is, at least she passes the the bechdel test

Unfortunately, Alice gets the last word. She comes across Jay, who is, quite understandably, getting drunk, because he's absolutely devastated after  witnessing his childhood playmate and his mother murder each other right in front of him. She tells him to stop sulking, and the crusader ghost chimes in with a "You go, girl!"

It's called mourning! Jesus.

And to wrap up this review: I like the depiction of Death in the book, as I had previously mentioned. He reminds me of Hades as the Greeks understood him. With the exception of Persephone, Hades wasn’t really a bad guy. He was dark and unpitying, but fundamentally just.  He was probably better than most of his cohorts, because if you're a Greek peasant, things probably aren't going to end well for you if you attract the attention of a god, and Hades just mostly kept to himself.

I also couldn't help but think of Dream, from Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. Dream is the position held by Morpheus, and while there must always be a Dream, the Endless can be killed. In the course of the series, Morpheus dies and another rises to become Dream. Likewise, while there must always be a Death, it need not always be the same Death. Earthma seeks to supplant him, by having her child, Antaeus, seize his cowl and thus his station. 

Death says "If you were to disassemble everything of me that you see before you, yet would the forces of the universe bring back toogether their overseer of entropy - somewhere, somehow - and I would return. I am necessary to the proper functioning of things..." (The wording is also very reminiscent of how the Steel General is described in Creatures of Light and Darkness, which returns to my earlier point that there seem to be elements from many Zelazny stories in Donnerjack.) Adding to the similarities is that Gaiman says that Zelazny's death and subsequent wake informed Morpheus's.

Is Donnerjack perfect? Not at all. But much like Creatures of Light and Darkness, I like it because of, not in spite of its flaws. It might have been a more polished work had Zelazny survived to finish it and there are some interesting insights about the original direction for the story in the handwritten outline called Donnerjack, of Virtù: A Fable for the Machine Age. It shows that the story would have been somewhat different (and also that Zelazny had absolutely appalling handwriting.) It's an interesting look at an interesting book.