The Corruption of Plague and Power (4/5)
Among all of Pohl's novels I've read, only Gateway (1977)
ranks highly... this indicates some intrinsic aspect of Pohl's focus
into his longer works that has either been lost upon me or has been numb
to me. Condensing the length of his works, Pohl's short stories,
novelettes, and novellas tend to be well thought out and enjoyable, as
is the case in Pohlstars (1984) and Man Who Ate the World (1960). The funny thing is, Pohl produced a large number of novels
through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s--all with some interesting premises.
When I see a previously unknown Pohl novel, I can't help but pick it up
even though I know I'll be leery about opening it up. This sums up my
expectation for A Plague of Pythons (alternative title: Demon in the Skull): an inherently bad novelist who has the unfortunate ability to drag out a perfectly good novelette into a trialing novel.
Rear cover synopsis:
"The World Was Possessed
Rapists,
killers, and mass-murders were everywhere. Once ordinary people, they
were suddenly possessed by some inexplicable force that controlled them,
enslaved them, and made them commit the most horrible crimes
imaginable.
Chandler had already raped and brutally assaulted a
helpless creature and the town had put him on trial for his life. No was
did they believe his story that he couldn't have stopped himself, that
he was merely a prisoner in his own body, a slave of whatever force was
turning the world upside down and making criminals out o common men.
Desperate
for freedom and hungry for revenge, Chandler knew he would travel to
the ends of the Earth to find his tormentors and destroy their power
forever."
------------
Chandler is an electric engineer in
a society which has eroded into the sad, hermetic state of not needing
any electrical engineers. The survival of the community had become more
important that the success and justice of the individual. Towns, like
Chandler's in California, became scattered, limited in number and strict
in its growth:
"There was real fear, well justified, of living
in large groups, for they too were lightening rods for possession. The
world was stumbling along, but it was lame in all its members; a
planetary lobotomy had stolen from its wisdom and plane" (30).
His
wife having been murdered by his best friend and filled with the guilt
of not mourning her death, Chandler now stands trial for a crime his
body committed, but his mind had not. The enemy who hi-jacked people's
mind suddenly struck on one day murdering others and the bodies they
possessed, reeking havoc in the cities, altering the path of humanity's
shared destiny of greatness. Now Chandler found himself a victim of
"Demons? Martians? No one knew whether the invaders of the soul were
from another world or from some djinn's bottle" (17).
Chandler
was acquitted of his crime through odd circumstances during his trial;
his banishment marked by the branded "H" on his forehead. Traveling by
train, he is adopted by a mountain people who live in perpetual pain
with barded wire anklets and deeply burned tissue to ward off the many
names possessors: "the imps, the `flame creatures,' the pythons, devils,
incubi or demons" (42) who have been infecting the minds of the
innocent. Their prophet Kahlil Gibran and his words are their mental
salve in the time when pain is their talisman against the evil
possessors.
Soon, Chandler finds himself among the physical
presence of the possessors, the same dreadful being who have been
committing acts of "murder, rape, arson, theft, sodomy, vandalism,
assault and battery or a dozen other offenses" (15) across the world.
Oddly enough, the crimes witnessed first in America (on Christmas during
nationwide television) were never perpetrated within the walls of
agricultural or medical establishments (nor were the citizens of Russia
ever assaulted, but the West's nukes took care of that). His expertise
is a valuable trait to the possessors and to his life, which becomes
more complex yet more important than ever.
------------
A
Plague of Pythons starts out strong and mighty with an enticing plot and
a conundrum, which is hale and hearty. The reader remains in the thick
for so long that time passes by, seems to evaporate--and I thought to
myself, "Wow, I can't believe Pohl wrote this!" Mysteries multiply as
Chandler follows a jagged path of revenge, some paths chosen by him but
other paths being shifted into Chandler's own agenda. The revelation of
"python's" was a bit of a let down, but Pohl masterfully constructed a
morality tale reflecting John Dalberg-Acton's quote, "absolute power
corrupts absolutely."
It's odd of Pohl to have setting outside
that of New York, near-space, or Chicago. The backdrop for Pythons is
the American western coast at a point which is "nearly three thousand
miles" (40) from Lehigh County, Pennsylvania... which actually puts it
at a distance closer to Quito, Ecuador or Reykjavik, Iceland or the
Yukon than it does to anywhere in California. Anyway, the important
factor is that the Californian setting puts it close to the isolated
base of the possessors; it's there that Chandler sees beyond the
insidious crimes and absorbs the scene of wholesale slaughter. Pohl
really takes a grim view with Pythons, an angle I haven't seen before
in, with maybe just a hint of uneasy horror of Reefs of Space (1964) and
his later Man Plus (1976). I love horror/sci-fi and this is quite the
penultimate novel for the earlier days of the sub-genre.
The
conclusion is well deserved and satisfactory, but it doesn't resonate
until you recall some of the earlier quotes from the characters, both of
the innocent party subjected to the possessors' ill-will and of the
possessors' themselves. If the reader is able to suspend one notion in
regards to the possessors' ability to infiltrate minds, then welcome to
the dystopia Pohl has created, a world oppressed by the brutal crimes of
an unseen force acting through the familiar faces of a village's
populace.
Perhaps I simply stumbled upon a Pohl novel in his
prime, the time prior to 1965; where after he wrote a smattering of
short fiction but nothing substantial his 1976 novel Man Plus. This is one of the best of seventeen Pohl books I've read besides Gateway, The Man Who Ate the World, and Merchants War
(1984). I won't go out on a limb and say Pohl has reignited my interest
in his bibliography, but I will maintain a keen eye out for his earlier
titles like Drunkard's Walk (1960), Slave Ship (1957), and Age of the Pussyfoot (1969). After those years there's not much to interest me.
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