Roger Zelazny Book Review: Divine Madness

Another short Roger Zelazny book review today.

I like Divine Madness. As with A Thing of Terrible Beauty, it's a simple story whose beauty comes from how it is told, the poetry employed in its telling and the wealth of imaginative details that let the reader really believe it is happening.

It's the story of a man, who had a stupid fight with his wife who then stormed off to her car and and died in an accident. Now he's living with the guilt that comes with that, and suffering from periodic episodes that cause him to experience things backwards. His doctors tell him that it isn't really happening, that it was grief and epilepsy, meeting to form an unusual syndrome, that of "a post-traumatic locomotor hallucination, elicited by anxiety, precipitated by the attack." He knows better however.

In This Moment of the Storm, Godfrey Holmes defined man as "Man is the sum total of everything he has done, wishes to do or not to do, and wishes he hadn't done, or hadn't." and this story proves it.  Everyone makes mistakes and this story is how we relive them, and sometimes, sometimes have the chance to correct them. It's told almost entirely without dialogue and that's something that works wonderfully for the mood of the piece, because it manages to convey the sense of absolute isolation that crippling grief brings with it.

Someone in the comments section coined the word "Zelaznian" and I promised to use it as much as possible. The story crackles with Zelaznian turns of phrase and clever details (as well as the Zelaznian standbys of green eyes and car accidents) : "A  faintly-remembered  nightmare ran in reverse though his mind, giving it an undeserved happy ending." "'.dust to dust; ashes to Ashes,' the man said, which is pretty much the same whichever way you say it."

And it's not hard to evoke a feeling of grief in someone who has lost a loved one, but the story never gets maudlin. The descriptions of events are genuinely beautiful, and they do a good job getting across the desperate regret.

Time's winged chariot fled before him as he opened the door and said "good-bye" to his comforters and they came in and sat down and told him  not to grieve overmuch.

And he wept without tears as he realized what was to come.

Despite his madness, he hurt.

...Hurt, as the days rolled backward.

...Backward, inexorably.

...Inexorably, until he knew the time was near at hand.

He gnashed the teeth of his mind.

Great was his grief and his hate and his love.

I especially like the ending, because he gets a chance to correct the biggest mistake he ever made:

The door slammed open.

She stared at him, her mascara smeared, tears upon her cheeks.

"!hell to go Then," he said.

"!going I'm," she said.

She stepped back inside, closed the door.

She hung her coat hurriedly in the hall closet.

".it about feel you way the that's If," he said shrugging.

"!yourself but anybody about care don't You," she said.

"!child a like behaving You're," he said.

"!sorry you're say least at could You"

Her  eyes  flashed  like  emeralds through the pink static, and she was lovely and alive again. In his mind he was dancing.

The change came.

"You could at least say you're sorry!"

"I am," he said, taking her hand in a grip that she  could  not  break.

"How much, you'll never know."

"Come here," and she did.