Review of Isle of the Dead by Roger Zelazny

If ever there were an author who enjoyed playing with and incorporating the world's mythologies in his speculative fiction, it was Roger Zelazny. Wikipedia has even devoted a section of his bibliography to a breakdown. Egyptian, Greek, Navajo, Norse, Indian—there is a list of origin lore that Zelazny found ways of weaving into science fiction tales (and a gruff, cigarette-smoking, world-weary male lead to boot). Looking to Hades is 1969's Isle of the Dead.

If the internets are to be believed, however, the inspiration for Isle of the Dead is actually a series of paintings by the artist Arnold Bocklin featuring, you guessed it, isles of the dead. The fantastical isles are captured in a surprisingly warm ambiance that possesses more hints of shadow than overt darkness. It leans toward the highs and lows of mortality more in tone than color.

Isle of the Dead is the story of one of the universe's top 100 richest men, Francis Sandow. He signed up for a generation starship trip of several centuries to a distant galaxy, only to discover upon waking that the universe evolved while he slept. But Sandow quickly caught up, building a thriving business on the colony world. And in the process he made enemies, one of whom contacts him at the outset of the novel to a challenge that might mean Sandow's life.

Zelazny is an excellent noir stylist, and in Isle of the Dead he deftly gets to the point. The novel is a clinic on effective minimalism. Unfortunately, style is the novel's high point. If it weren't for the direct, no nonsense prose, in fact, I'm not sure the novel could stand up.

Things start well. Zelazny lays down a convincing enough scene: ultra-rich man, getting older, the reality of mortality settling in. All good. He goes out with exes, meets with business colleagues, etc., and in this process comes to find out he has a rival who wants him dead. It's at this point the novel starts to fade. It isn't immediately obvious, however. Slowly Zelazny blurs the view. Nebulous enemies, teleportation, random new powerful characters, telekinesis, etc. The reader doesn't get lost, but with each new element the hand waving becomes a hand blurring. The waters get muddy, achieving their muddiest in the closing sections.

And along with plot so too does theme get muddy. Which is a bit unfortunate. Zelazny's treatment of perennial concepts has often enough been fascinating. ...This Immortal, Lord of Light, Eye of Cat—these are good novels. A novel about death, particularly the way the novel begins, holds promise. But slowly it devolves into pulpish meandering. It gets lost in the spaces between metaphor, mimesis and imagination.

In the end, Isle of the Dead is a book that starts strong but steadily diffuses itself into a semi-faceless science fiction milieu. In the process, it largely loses hold on theme. Rather than reflection on death, it becomes a pulp-ish mix of telekinesis, aliens, laser blasters, etc. The prose is sharp, and if it didn't cut the way it does, would be difficult to push on.