I'm currently reading The Devil Is Dead by R. A. Lafferty. Really rereading it. In fact I'm pretty sure I own a copy but I got this one from the library because I'm not sure exactly where I left it.
Won't bother recapping the exact plot. But it's a novel of the sea, and a tall tale. It's been said that James Joyce was working on a maritime novel when he died. Lafferty may have been thinking of that. Like Joyce, he's writing a contemporary story but informed by myth, and specifically the myths of Odysseus. It's just that Lafferty is pushing the non-naturalistic elements a little further. Oh, and the protagonist is named Finnegan, which I don't think is a coincidence.
Regardless of sources Lafferty is writing his characters larger than life, with comic effects. That doesn't mean they can't be familiar. Observe:
Finnegan had never seen anything like her. She was Clotworthy's secretary, Marie Courtois, a magnificent young woman. That the girl was evil was insisted upon by Anastasia who had a better than average perception of good and evil. And Marie also had a distaste for Anastasia, more for what she stood for than herself. Believing that good and evil are superstitions, Marie could not ascribe evil to Anastasia: she ascribed instead ideological immaturity, chauvinistic disorientation, and neo-fascistic indoctrination. For that is one of the kinds of girl that Marie was.
Huh. Sounds eerily familiar. In fact while the novel was first published in 1971, a full fifty years ago, there are passages that could have been written this morning.
2 comments:
How interesting you've discovered R.A. Laffery. In those long ago days when science fiction writers were few and far between and I first fell in love with the genre I enjoyed his books a lot (one of those authors consigned to sci-fi but only beacuse they didn't know where else to shelve him). Unfortunately, with the passing of so much time I'd forgotten just how much I liked his truly unique brilliance.
We went to Russell's today where Jer remembered to see if they had any of his novels or short story collections. Alas, there were none. It's the kind of place where you can find all of Stephen King's works (and George R.R. Martin) and scores of books written in the past few years, but few of the sci-fi fantasy classics.. or any number of others you might prefer to read.
So my next foray to the Abebooks website will be to find a few of Lafferty's books - including The Devis is Dead. Thanks for the reminder.
I think the first time I read him was when one of his stories was included in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology, which I read in college. That one was distinctive, but it took me a while to search out more of him. He was really great at the short story form. His novel The Reefs of Earth is really delightful too. As for this one, it's a really great ride. Although unfortunately the library's copy is a little damaged, so this time out I missed some stuff from the last chapters.
It's unfortunate that Russell's doesn't offer more variety in the science fiction field, and other genres, I'm guessing. The World Wide Web tends to treat consumers as an undifferentiated mass, rather than acknowledging that people are going to have idiosyncratic preferences. Of course they're a used bookstore, so maybe they're limited by what people sell/trade/donate. How much of a factor that is I don't know.
It's too bad that Amazon took over Abebooks, but it's still a good resource for out-of-print stuff.
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