Roger Zelazny Book Review: Comes Now the Power

It's funny. I can see the search terms people have used to reach the site (and some of them are kind of disturbing and worthy of a post in their own right) and lately I've been getting a bunch of hits for variations of the search: Zelazny analysis Comes Now the Power. It makes me wonder if some Zelazny loving prof out there issued an assignment on the story. I didn't have a review of it prior to today, but searchers were directed here regardless, because "comes" "now" "the" and "power' are pretty common words anywhere, and "Zelazny" is not exactly rare in this corner of the internet. (And also, I see that the story was mentioned in the comments section as one of Chris's favorites.)

Anyway, enough preamble.  This is another one from Zelazny's darkest day, when he was dealing with the death of his father. ("I wrote this story on one of the blackest days in my memory, a day of extreme wretchedness accompanied by an unusual burst of writing activity—which I encouraged, to keep from thinking about what was bothering me. I sat down and did three short stories, one after the other without leaving the typewriter. They were 'Divine Madness,' this one and 'But Not the Herald.'") Power and Madness are both brilliant in their melancholy, but Herald is literally forgettable. (I didn't have a copy in front of me and I had to Google it to remember that it's the one with Hercules.)

Like Divine Madness, Comes Now the Power achingly invokes the feelings of absolute despair. This is depression at its bleakest, not a mere temporal sadness, but the inability to conceive of a time when things will ever be any better than they are now. It's like Frodo says in Return of he King: "No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades."

Despair like that is a crushing weight that not only comes to dominate your world, it becomes your entire world. It is despair like that which Zelazny must have channeled in writing the story and which protagonist Milt Rand now feels.  Rand has some sort of psychic power, the exercise of which is blocked by his current state of mind.

The divorce had beaten hell out of him.

It is bad enough to know that somewhere someone is hating you; but to have known the very form of that hatred and to have proven ineffectual against it, to have known it as the hater held it for you, to have lived with it growing around you, this is more than distasteful circumstance. Whether you are offender or offended, when you are hated and you live within the circle of that hate, it takes a thing from you: it tears a piece of spirit from your soul, or, if you prefer, a way of thinking from your mind; it cuts and does not cauterize.

Milt Rand dragged his bleeding psyche around the country and returned home.

The descriptions of his wanderings seem to parallel those of the character in Madness, looking for anything to fill that vacant spot. He had known some others with the same power that he held, and contact with them was impossible for various reasons, which was unfortunate, because contact with another such empowered individual is often therapeutic in the case of a blockage such as Milt has.

One day he touches another mind such as his, but contact is fleeting, and soon broken. But it is the first hint of progress that Rand has known, so he pursues it again, reuniting after a time with the mind, and restoring his own power thereby. And now that it is returned to him, he realizes that the presence with which he has been communicating is that of a little girl dying of leukemia, and that her efforts to help him may have hastened her own death. Seeing that is so, he resolves to show her every thing of beauty he has ever known.

He calls upon the power that lives within him now, fused with his will and his sense, his thoughts, memories, feelings. In one great blaze of life, he shows her Milt Rand.

Here is everything I have, all I have ever been that might please. Here is swarming through a foggy night, blinking on and off. Here is lying beneath a bush as the rains of summer fall about you, drip from the leaves upon your fox-soft fur. Here is the moon-dance of the deer, the dream drift of the trout beneath the dark swell, blood cold as the waters about you.

Here is Tatya dancing and Walker preaching; here is my cousin Gary, as he whittles, contriving a ball within a box, all out of one piece of wood. This is my New York and my Paris. This, my favorite meal, drink, cigar, restaurant, park, road to drive on late at night; this is where I dug tunnels, built a lean-to, went swimming; this, my first kiss; these are the tears of loss; this is exile and alone, and recovery, awe, joy; these, my grandmother's daffodils: this her coffin, daffodils about it; these are the colors of the music I love, and this is my dog who lived long and was good. See all the things that heat the spirit, cool within the mind, are encased in memory and one's self. I give them to you, who have no time to know them.

He sees himself standing on the far hills of her mind. She laughs aloud then, and in her room somewhere high away a hand is laid upon her and her wrist is taken between fingers and thumb as she rushes toward him suddenly grown large. His great black wings sweep forward to fold her wordless spasm of life, then are empty.

It shouldn't be surprisingly that the structure parallels that of Divine Madness to an extent (gut-twisting tragedy leading to joy, transcendent in the case of Madness, bittersweet here in Power), as they both are drawn from the same source. It appeals to my personal belief system. I don't believe in any kind of personal immortality, but I think as long as you can remember the departed and remember the things that brought them joy, that's some solace in the face of death.

It did not change me in the same ways as Divine Madness, but it is worthy sister piece and moving in its own way.