Like the Da Vinci Code (but without the Stupid Puzzles): a Review of The Dead Man’s Brother

Title: The Dead Man’s Brother
Author: Roger Zelazny
Year: 2009 (written ~1971)
Rating: 2/5 phallic machetes
Categories: Unchallenging Thriller, Male Fantasy
Back Cover:

Once an art smuggler, now a respectable art dealer, Ovid Wiley awoke to find his former partner stabbed to death on his gallery floor.  That was strange enough—but when a CIA agent showed up to spring him from NYPD custody, things got a lot stranger.

Now the CIA is offering to clear up the murder charge, but only in return for a favor: They want Ovid to fly to Vatican City and trace the trail of a renegade priest who has gone missing with millions in church funds. What’s the connection? The priest’s lover, a woman Ovid knew in his smuggling days…

When I was about 13 years old, I found a collection of short stories in the library of the Catholic school I attended that contained something that you could almost consider a sex scene.  The collection was Unicorn Variations and the thrill of juvenile transgression it engendered—that sweet, hot blush of shame that only the lapsed Catholic could ever understand—seems to have transformed me into a Zelazny fan for life.  So when I heard that a previously undiscovered Zelazny manuscript, unpublished for close to 40 years, was going to see a posthumous printing thanks to the excellent Hard Case Crime series, there was never any doubt that I was going to read it.  You could hardly even call it a choice…more of a compulsion.  A wicked sin I was helpless to resist.

Zelazny won 6 Hugo Awards and 3 Nebula Awards for his science-fiction, and as far as I’m concerned, he deserved them all.  But early on in my enjoyment of his work, it had become obvious to me that there were almost two Zelaznys.  There was the experimental Zelazny, the student of literature, who used his novellas and novels to explore themes like mortality, will, and our relationship to myth and story, who tested the limits of his genre and helped to define the New Wave of American sci-fi in the late 60’s and early 70’s, AND THEN there was the indulgent, five-finger-exercise Zelazny, who (imaginatively, at least) articulated the rambling adventure fantasies of 13 year old boys.

The Dead Man’s Brother, though it was allegedly penned shortly after such masterpieces as Lord of Light and Isle of the Dead, was regrettably written by that latter, lesser Zelazny who vomited up such guilty pleasures as Damnation Alley and a good portion of The Amber Chronicles. 

While Zelazny often made a point to walk the line between sci-fi and fantasy, The Dead Man’s Brother is the only published crime novel he ever wrote.  I’m not sure if I hope there are more undiscovered crime novel manuscripts or not.  I’d read them, of course.  The problems with the novel, however, do not stem from any lack of familiarity or facility with the genre.  In some respects, Zelazny’s writing style is extremely well-suited to crime.  His heroes have always been a bit hard-boiled.  They’re often noir-ish, selfish smartasses who won’t hesitate to deliver a cheap shot if given the chance.  They’re often motivated by revenge when it does not conflict with self-preservation. 

The problem with the novel is that there isn’t anything to it except the selfish smartass.  The plot (which consists of the hero tracking down, under duress from a blackmailing CIA agent, a renegade priest who has disappeared deep into the Brazilian jungle with loads of Vatican cash) moves along quickly enough but without any real development.  The hero is the same at the end as he was at the beginning.  No literary experimentation.  No genre deconstruction.  No intellective engagement.  None of the characteristics that identify a novel as Zelazny operating at his peak, and at about 250 pages, especially for a slow reader like myself, you could hardly categorize The Dead Man’s Brother as a quick read.

So read it if you’re a fan of the author or a 13 year old boy, but otherwise you should probably steer clear.

NB I’m not making any excuses for the retro cover art painted by Chuck Pyle for Hard Case Crime, though.  That’s unconditionally awesome.

Thoughts on Lexx, Part 3

I have finished up with all four seasons of Lexx now, and this post is going to contain some spoilers.

In (what has turned out to be) this short three-part series on Lexx, I have been attempting to think through my sense that by offering up a parody of Star Trek:TNG, Lexx inadvertently distills a humorous, posthumanist antidote to the humanist poison of that much more well-known series.  I wanted to write of Lexx what Sørina Higgins has written of Cary Wolfe’s What is Posthumanism? (2010) in her recent review of the book, “Posthumanism: A Christian Response”:

it seeks to problematize humanity’s unique existence; it calls into question universal ethics; it interrogates our assumptions about rationality; and it destabilized distinctions that are essential to religion, such as nature/culture, presence/absence, and human/nonhuman.

Now, I haven’t said anything about Lexx’s treatment of religion, of course, and there’s probably something to be said about it.  TNG, while secular, at least tended towards a multicultural tolerance of diverse faiths, I think, whereas Lexx was quite a bit more antagonistic, particularly in the first season, in which the primary villain was His Divine Shadow, the tyrant ruler (actually an insect-spirit in disguise as a anthropomorphic god) of the so-called “Light Universe” (there are two universes in Lexx until the one is destroyed) and in the third season in which the Lexx spends 12 episodes orbiting two planets that turn out to be forms of heaven and hell existing without apparent purpose.

But I’m less interested in what satirical barbs Lexx may or may not direct at religion than I am in the ways it makes the human body mutable, the individual divisible, the human spirit both complex and indistinct from its machine, animal, and alien environments.

However, like the crew of the Lexx, who might occasionally swap genders, re-grow limbs and other organs, or die and be reborn,  the series undergoes sometimes drastic transformations from one season to the next.  Unfortunately, not every evolutionary adaptation proves viable, and, regretfully (to me), it seems the writers opted in the end to contrive the triumphant return of the human.  Alas.   Each of those characteristics that I initially found so interesting…so “problematiz[ing],” to use Higgins’ phrase, “of humanity’s unique existence”  is ultimately undone in the final episode. 

The fighting spirit and contempt for the non-human that comes just so naturally to our species finally overwhelms Stanley’s hitherto un-

Kirk-like cowardice.  The undead Kai, whose catch phrase had once been some variant of “The Dead do not feel,” is restored to life so that he may lay down his life for his friends.  The profundity of longing professed by the robot head, 790, is belied by the coldness with which he calculates how to destroy the earth and kill all living humans.  Only Xev, in the end, comfortably in her lizard-skin outfit, still acknowledges her hybridity.  But one wonders, any more, whether her Cluster-Lizard DNA could still manage to unbalance her, as it once had led her to kill and eat a series of human mates, or had she learned finally to master it, to colonize her reptilian self, to make it subservient to her human control-center? 

I fear that, passing through the crucible of post-humanity, the crew of the Lexx emerge not reconfigured but purified, and I’m left feeling gratified but no stranger.