David
Lynch’s film Blue Velvet opens with a
shot of an ultra-typical, American suburban home. Slowly zooming in on the lawn, the view descends
through blades of grass to the swarm of insects in the earth beneath. While Lynch used the symbolism to represent
his opinion of what was happening behind the white-picket fence, 1.5 children
veneer of suburban America, it’s also possible to transpose the symbolism into
other areas, the human mind among them.
The veneer the late 60s and early 70s free love and groovy times, Robert
Silverberg uses his 1971 The Book of
Skulls to dig beneath its surface, particularly the era’s male youth to find
what swarms beneath. It isn’t pretty.
But
the novel starts in thriller land. Four
will enter: one will commit suicide and another be murdered, and the last two
will exit immortal. Thankfully, The Book of Skulls is more than this
cheesy idea would promise. Hovering
uncertainly between realist fiction and satire, the premise is engaged and
resolved via character rather than plot or melodrama. Rendered in smooth and subtly affective
prose, Silverberg presents the machinations of four human minds in all their
dirty detail while taking to task aspects of the (post?) flower-power mindset.
The
“four who enter” are college students living in NYC: Ned, an Irish Catholic
homosexual; Oliver, a blond-haired Midwestern guy come to the big city to make
something of himself; Eli, a morbid Jew specializing in Latin philology; and
Timothy, the son of an aristocrat floating through school on his laurels. Eli encountering the eponymous Book of Skulls
in one of his library deep dives, he spreads the word, and together the four
make a compact—who will be killed, who will kill themselves, and who will
attain immortality—and set out on road trip to the wilds of Arizona where the
temple granting their wish purportedly exists.
Knowing
the premise, I went into The Book of
Skulls deathly afraid (sorry…) Silverberg would resolve the novel along
Hollywood lines. What tricks will he
play resolving who dies, who kills themselves, etc.? Of course, things cannot turn out as simple
as the guys’ initial compact would indicate, can they? Will there be doppelgangers? Projected selves? Moral backdoors (a la A Tale of Two Cities)?
Cheesy horror elements? In what
form will immortality actually appear?
Portraits? Fame? Children?
But
Silverberg plays things straight. As
mentioned, the focus is digging into the heads of the four characters. Their situations, mindsets, fears, darkest
secrets—nearly everything is exposed such that the lawn becomes the insects,
the psyche of the four youth is laid bare to the reader.
Mostly
a meditation on life and death, from the artistic (a la The Sorrows of Young Werther or Kurt Cobain’s life in media) to the
metaphysical (religion, spiritualism and beyond), The Book of Skulls is occupied with mortality and further reality. Unlike Silverberg’s other works “Born with the Dead” and “Sailing to Byzantium,” immortality is not a reality to the four
young men, only a potential reality, resulting in much discourse on what it
could mean, and does mean. Sex the other
major component (there is much, much jutting of cones, jiggling of melons,
swaying of cannons, etc.), Silverberg reduces the four to their most basic
instincts in his examination of character.
In
the end, Silverberg may go overboard with the sexual content (given four
20-something males are his protagonists and each is presented first-person, it
may not be so unrealistic, however), but all else is an engaging look into the
mind of youth in the late 60s/early 70s.
Their stances on life, death, and mortality presented, turned
upside-down, and then turned upside-down again, the Hollywood-esque premise is
used to scrutinize, and most likely satirize, their generation’s path through
American society. Another way of putting
this is, for that portion of spec fic readers who believe science fiction is
not science fiction unless there are aliens, ray guns, or space ships, this
book is not for you. For those
interested in the cultural and human elements, this may be for you.
Great review! When I read this novel about 16 years ago, I wondered where the SF was in this "SF Masterwork". I don't consider it SF at all - it's more Pysch-Fiction (if that' a genre). A classic travelogue about four teens getting to know themselves, with a premise of doom (or immortality) over their heads.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, I don't remember any of the sexual content.
I gotta agree with you. The only thing that might be considered remotely "sf" is the monk commune the guys encounter toward the end, but even that feels more fantasy than sf. I guess the editors of the SF Masterworks really wanted to include the book in the series and gave Silverberg, predominantly an sf writer, the benefit of the doubt. As to the sexual content, it's Silverberg, so there are going to be references to ripe, heaving breasts and more...
DeleteBack in the day, this book was VERY hard to find, I first read it on an inter-library loan ca 1976 or so. Very haunting, it doesn't seem all that much when you read it, yet you remember it years later and go back to it for another read.
ReplyDelete