Name: Carrion comfort
Rating: 4.090909090909091 (11 reviews)
ISBN: 0747234051

Dan Simmons

Carrion comfort

Tim Pendry

The twentieth century Anniversary Edition is the one to get because it has a remarkable 20-page or so introduction that lays bare the publishing history and the intellectual and personal origins of what was to be Simmons' second published novel. Any aspiring genre writer should read this introduction because of its insights into what it means to be a writer in a recession. It gives interesting clues to the personality of an author whose psychodynamics embrace the hope of education and deep pessimism about the human condition. This is not as good as 'Song of Kali' though not by much. The fault may lie in its origin. The traumatic process of getting it published seems to have resulted in a stubborn determination to make it 'perfect' rather than just 'good enough' for publication. The result is that it is almost too 'perfect' - a truly innovative vampiric plot line, excellent characterisation and a detail of descriptive execution that is quite staggering sometimes. But that is where the problem lies. It is 767 pages long. A good editor might have suggested some restraint in the action thriller scenes that go through every detail of a car chase or fire fight. It is like watching a movie except that movies are not novels and novels are not movies. The effect is sometimes a little tiresome. Maybe 100-150 pages could have been lost and the reader allowed more imagination for themselves. And perhaps a little more 'spelling it out' at other key points because the writer was throwing so much data at us that perhaps the trees obscured the wood for a short while. But praise is still due if only because he takes up the holocaust meme and does not make it trite and sentimental. It is of its time (1979) when the Holocaust was perhaps rawer than it is now to a student of human evil (for that is what Simmons clearly is). Today it might be harder to write this story and not have it look hackneyed or ludicrous but his account of Jewish revenge and ultimately unintended consequences - and of moral anbiguity - still rings true, unaffected by what has happened since to the Holocaust meme in popular literature. Mossad too is not caricatured - though definitely heroes, their heroism is contextualised and Simmons is not afraid to note when Israelis behave as badly as their past oppressors. He writes of Jews without being either patronising or overly stereotypical. The story itself is of vampires as powerful atavistic genetic sports - few in number but deeply murderous by nature. He plays this out like the chess games that are so central to the world view of his Oberst character. Of course, the brilliant plotting relies far too much on luck - or is it ineluctable fate - so that it reads too much like a recent Tom Cruise movie to be wholly credible. But credibility is not the point of the book in any case. We are in the realm of existential metaphor. The mind vampires are just an exaggeration of the human condition. Even Hitler is hinted to be as (in the Bunker) a victim of a vampire rather than being one (as more trite writers would offer us). The vampires are an opportunity to examine our animal roots and find them wanting. Simmons is also a liberal in the American sense. The story is one of diversity heroes and rebels (this is 1979 so we are talking race and gender though not sexual orientation) countering variants of white supremacism, religious manipulation and monied power yet handled with a light touch. The political elite is seen as part-creature of the vampires and the facilitation of evil requires the participation of so-called Neutrals who choose to serve evil without question of which the type is the cold introvert Maria Chen who we can see is clearly existentially desperate for love. In other words, the hold of vampires is partly one of direct mind control of 'victims' but it is equally one of collaboration from those humans without moral compass. Read physical force for mind control and this is the story of the holocaust. The strange ambiguous love story of Harod and Chen, two psychopaths, is an allegory of life at the borderline where the instinct for survival competes with the last lingerings of some forgotten need for love and wins out. These two have a history that is all-too-human somewhere there. Each is just on the other side of the border line between human and vampire from the other and makes one wonder whether either could have been saved by a different origin, a childhood that was not abused or unlucky. This is Simmonds trying to find the point where evil begins and ends. Chen's final sacrifice, whether cold despair or something approaching selfless love, is compared implicitly with Harod's revenge for her sacrifice, yet another act of brutal violence even if it helps our heroes. And perhaps this is the border line between human and vampire - redemption. There is also violence of social situation (exemplified by a violent black street gang who become allies of the heroes) set against innate genetic evil, animalistic and original (as in original sin). This is the classic liberal (and socialist) problem that all the progressive education in the world cannot deal with the true sociopath. There is a hint of this awareness in Simmons' introduction where he tells us something of his teaching background which clearly meant a great deal to him. Tony Harod may interest twenty-first readers in particular - the weakest of the mind vampires, a film producer who can only use his skills on women and uses it for psychopathic sexual gratification. He is also the only mind vampire whose evil may have emerged situationally. Harod exists to show a continuum from normal psychopathy to the pure evil of the three main evil protagonists who had a Brady-Hindley cohesion of sorts, with an evil televangelist and an evil billionaire as half way houses. Harod even gains brief sympathy at times as a loser out of his depth. Simmons is intent, it would seem, on seeing evil as a gradient with Harod, who exemplifies the problem that was to launch the #metoo novement, being the link between psychopathic ordinary humanity and the genetic sports whose extreme element is genocidal. Abusing women, murdering for gain or manipulating for wealth, causing pain or killing for entertainment and pleasure, genocide - these all happen to people in a tale that is actually about the real source of evil, differential power relations amongst morally unequal people. The gradient continues to the final surviving vampire. The story is always one of brutal competition for power between the players as much as its use against 'us' so that the final insane survivor must ineluctably be the one capable of the most heinous crime from a human point of view. The ordinary humans suffer, survive or die around this tiny group of creatures in this long metaphor for the nature of power in society. A fine if flawed novel which I can understand Stephen King accepting as a worthy offering within his own tradition of dense narratives about evil.

Carrion comfort

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