Reviews
My favorite Frank Herbert novel. This time around, 4 stars. The Santaroga Barrier is my favorite Frank Herbert novel. I originally read it in 1988, a few weeks before I read Dune (1965). When I started the road narrative spectrum project, I knew I wanted to re-read the novel for the project. In thirty-two years I've forgotten a lot, although the basic gist stuck with me. A man goes after his girl friend when she unexpectedly leaves college. She's a native of a mysterious and insular town that in modern parlance would be called "off grid." Reading it now as an adult and a college education, I see that from the very first paragraph, Herbert has peppered his book with psychology/philosophy terms to give a deeper meaning to his novel. Put another way, he's giving an informed reader a shorthand or not so secret handshake to know what's going on before the protagonist does. 3333CC (couple rural maze) http://pussreboots.com/blog/2020/comm...
I'm fascinated by reading other works by a writer best known for one title. It's interesting, for example, to read Bram Stoker's non-Dracula fiction. And so it is with Frank Herbert, a writer possessed of an astonishing mind, best known for the sf classic Dune, and yet someone who also produced many other novels and stories. You can't help but look for links between the lesser works and the masterpieces. If the other story appeared earlier, it seems like an antecedent. If it follows, the text appears in the giant's shadow. Santaroga Barrier can't escape the shadow of Arrakis. Yes, it's a very different book. It takes place in contemporary America, rather than in the far-off future and across alien worlds. It's a fairly taut mystery, rather than a sprawling space opera. Its protagonist is a psychologist, rather than a galactic messiah. But the links are clear, unsurprisingly as Santaroga appeared just four years after Dune's first publication, and one year before Dune Messiah. Let me summarize the book, first, and without spoilers. Santaroga Barrier concerns an investigation into a strange Californian town that is unusually isolated from the surrounding area. A group of investors hires Gilbert Dasein (great name) to figure out Santaroga's secrets. He quickly learns that the town's identity is based on using a mysterious substance called Jaspers, and that they've built an intentional community around its powers. Dasein is in love with a Santarogan he went to school with, and their relationship yields a romance plot. It's a good suspense tale. Herbert feeds us clues generously, but not overmuch. Mysteries appear, to be tackled. And the second half ratchets up the tension with escalating physical challenges, including an awesome series of "accidents." It's almost impossible to read Santaroga without seeing the historical context. Jaspers stands in for the 1960s drug culture, obviously. The intentional community echoes contemporary communes and utopian projects. Race politics appear early on, as Dasein wonders if the locals are racist, and if there are integration problems. Santarogans' critique of the rest of America jibes well with both the counterculture and also the emerging mainstream sense of self-doubt. Somewhat out of step is the idea of a heroic psychologist, which feels more like a 1940s idea, especially as contemporary reform and splinter movements within psychology don't really appear. I was especially taken with the idea of a non-countercultural community building up a drug-based utopia. Through speech and manners Herbert carefully establishes Santarogans as ordinary middle Americans, rather than hippies: middle aged, too, rather than young. He avoids the typical Californian attitude of equating California with the rest of the nation by identifying people as having moved to Santaroga from Louisiana and New England. The novel could have connected with the back-to-the-land movement by expanding on Jaspers as a natural, rather than synthetic product, but the community is resolutely modern, complete with cars and greenhouses. (There is dislike of tv, but that doesn't seem too radical for the time; I share the attitude, myself.) What about the Dune resonances? The big one is a drug organizing a new way of life. Jaspers isn't melange, but it's close. Dasein spends a lot of time tracking how his mental awareness changes under its impact, including speeding up of cognition and allowing access to a kind of group mind. Jaspers improves people, it's suggested, and Dasein as problem-solving hero starts talking about gods towards the end. The drug also appears in an ecological framework, as we follow its presence in multiple environmental niches. I was very taken by the novel. It has many classic Herbert features: conversations that become cryptic, even maddening; oblique observations that set the reader's mind buzzing; a shift from concrete details to macro discussions about civilization and humanity; that nearly conspiratorial sense of multiple forces and politics overlapping, often from the shadows. Like many of his early and middle period novels other than Dune, such as the brilliant Whipping Star, Santaroga Barrier is a short and focused novel, almost a novella, which I appreciate. There are some fun jokes, like naming the hero after Heidegger's notion of being, Jaspers after Karl, and having a psychologist named Piaget. Two off notes remain, and I can only mention them with spoiler shields on.(view spoiler)[First, the female love interest is a thin stereotype, like a 1930s Universal horror film character. Jenny has no interior life. Her education is shunted aside in favor of basic administrative work. She only lives to love and care for Dasein. She has embarrassing to read in 2018. Second, the final moments are a bit too restrained, as Gilbert and Jenny agree to marry and live within the Jaspers land. There's just a hint that Santaroga might expand, but that's left undeveloped. We don't know how the outside world will respond, including the investors who kicked off the plot. (hide spoiler)] Otherwise, recommended. Have a bottle of Santaroga beer while you read.
