Customer Reviews

City of illusion,: A novel

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One of the pitfalls of writing historical fiction is that occasionally the subject written about is just, frankly, not that interesting. This is what the reader discovers very quickly about Vardis Fisher's effort to recapture the frenetically charged atmosphere of Virginia City, Nevada during the Comstock silver rush of the 1860s. Of all the people whom Fisher could have written about (and some whom he might have invented) he chose to make Eilley Orrum Bowers the center of his novel. The story of an overly ambitious and greedy woman who dreams of being wealthy and who achieves this dream only to see it vanish has been told too many times to be counted, and forces Fisher to shuffle between biography and the fantastic in order to keep the reader's interest.

Fisher does a good job setting the scene for his novel and the early parts of the narrative has a certain raw attractiveness to it as he introduces his characters (historical and fictional) to the reader. His descriptions of the madness and hysteria of the first prospectors and the hardships and squalid conditions of Virginia City are quite realistic and brings the time and place to life. Unfortunately, he is not able to sustain this intensity; in addition, his characters are for the most two dimensional and become merely stock players in the melodrama that unfolds. Only three of the characters really come to life: Eilley's husband, Sandy, who maintains his individuality and humanity even though he is treated like a disobedient child by Eilley; Luff, a philosophical miner who never gets caught up in the hysteria of the Comstock, and Luff's daughter, Nita, who understands at a very young age the advantages she has over men. To the detriment of Fisher's book, they are only minor characters and the novel is concerned with Eilley and her asinine efforts to become "Queen of the Comstock", a self-delusional goal that she neither has the intelligence nor background to obtain.

Given the fact that only one of his books is still in print, it is hard to believe that Vardis Fisher enjoyed quite a bit of literary success in the 1930s. Although he did not achieve the same fame as Thomas Wolfe, both writers were often compared to each other as masters of the self-confessional novel. Fisher was a very prolific writer, having written thirty-eight novels in addition to essays, criticism, and poetry. His finest work is the Vridar Hunter Tetralogy, a four volume biographical novel in the same vane as Look Homeward Angel; and Children of God, a novel of the Mormon settlement of Utah. In addition, he wrote The Testament of Man series, a twelve volume fictional work that traces man's intellectual development from the cave to civilization. Of course, among these gems there is a lot of slag. Although City of Illusion doesn't quite fit this latter category it is not one of his best efforts -- but still the reader can get a glimpse of the talent that Fisher possessed scattered throughout the novel. One of the finest examples is the description of Luff's death in which the miner and a dying goat, both accidentally fallen down an abandoned shaft, "share the final fellowship of death." This book only barely reaches the level of three stars but it is still a good read for those who are interested in this period of American history.