Customer Reviews

Escape from Hell

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

My advice, if you enjoyed Niven/Pournelle's Inferno, is to just forget you heard there was a sequel. I had some misgivings going in, mostly because I felt the original didn't really leave any unresolved issues that would make a sequel worthwhile. Escape from Hell is an aimless, poorly thought out mishmash that neither explores any new ground nor builds on the original in any substantial way. And it's dull. Inferno worked as an adventure story, a thoughtful exploration of society's changing attitidue toward the concept of an afterlife, and social commentary. Escape from Hell works as none of these.

I'm very disappointed, because I'm a big fan of Niven and Pournelle, and Inferno is not only one of their best novels, but one of my favorite novels, period. Having said that, their history with sequels to their major works (e.g., The Gripping Hand, sequel to The Mote in God's Eye), is not good. The only reason I can come up with that Niven/Pournelle decided to write Escape from Hell, other than the money, of course, is that some people have croaked in the last 30 years that they wanted to place in some particular spot in Hell.

Do yourself a favor and pass.

My parents had a 1948 edition of the White translation of Dante's "The Divine Comedy," the one with the Doré engravings. Those engravings were dark, gruesome and vivid; they were fascinating to a teenager, and sucked me in to Dante's great work. And demonstrated to me that the first book of "The Divine Comedy," "Inferno," was by far the most interesting.

In 1976, Niven and Pournelle published their "Inferno," a modern re-working of the first book of Dante's opus. instead of Dante, the narrator was the fictional Alan Carpentier, nee Carpenter, a pedestrian science fiction writer. Dante's guide was Virgil, the great Roman poet. Carpenter's guide was, well, that's a surprise, but let's just say he was Italian also.

"Inferno" was interesting, but not great. In some ways, it also represented Niven's lamentable descent into travelogue instead of plot. You know, "Inferno on $5 A Day." But the novel also had some excellent moments, including the apparent ramblings of a mad psychiatrist, who turned out to understand the real purpose of Hell, or at least of Niven's modern Inferno. The novel was a complete work; there was no real need to go back. There was no need for a sequel.

But go back we did. In the overwrought title, "Escape from Hell," Niven and Pournelle revisit Alan Carpenter as he tries to put into effect the ideas he developed in "Inferno." They don't involve any escape from Hell; quite the opposite.

Again, the novel has its moments. The despairing would-be rescuer of souls reclines on the roots of a tree in the Wood of Suicides. And the tree turns out to hold the spirit of Sylvia Plath. The first half of the novel has Carpenter tell the story of his failures to Plath. Nice irony, especially if you've read Plath's poetry. But the back story device isn't successful; the dialog with Plath is much more interesting than Carpenter's earlier fumblings. Not until Plath is out of the tree and headed further into Hell does the story really pick up, and then gets even more badly bogged down in the complexities of papal encyclicals. (I couldn't make this up.)

And while I have a pretty good grasp of "The Divine Comedy," I sure couldn't figure out why are there exploding Arab terrorists roaming Hell? And can someone explain how Robert Oppenheimer's fate fits into the plot? Other than as a nuclear deus ex machina? And exactly what has happened, in Heaven, Earth or Hell, that is causing humans to supplant Dante's demons as the administrators of Hell? Why do a series of minor New Orleans political hacks become Princes of Hell? Why does Aimee Semple McPherson, 1930's woman radio evangelist, have a Harley in Hell? All of these are interesting images and ideas, but they float through the plot without being linked to any explanation. Niven and Pournelle used to bring us airtight plots. Not this time.

Three stars for the return of Nascar Oscar and Billy the Kid, but that's being generous. Read their earlier "Inferno;" it's pretty good. Anyone but collectors should skip the hardback "Escape from Hell" and wait for the paperback.

I read "Inferno" when I was junior in high school and loved it. It was a fantastic adventure story that took the classic story by Dante and brought it to life for the 2oth century. I've grown and matured since 1976 and Pournelle's and Niven's creation has evolved too in "Escape From Hell". This book is richer in character development and in it's philosophy. I avoided reading the list of characters at the beginning of the book so as to be surprised on discovering whom the authors placed in hell. There were some "laugh out loud moments", such as the discovery of the identity of "Pink Talon", as well as some profound moments that touched me. I read the book in two days and was throughly entertained. A highly recommended book!

Deceased SF writer Allen Carpenter helped Mussolini escape from Hell and now he's back, intent on helping Hell's entire population escape. It turns out, though, that a lot of Hell's population is happy where they are. Carpenter does have one early success, though. He discovers poet Sylvia Plath transformed into a tree (the fate for suicides) and comes up with a painful way of helping her escape from that prison. Together, the two writers explore Dante's Hell, where they run across any number of mostly-Democratic politicians, lawyers and scientists...and help out assorted Nazis.

ESCAPE FROM HELL is a sequel to INFERNO, also by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, bringing back Carpenter for a second run through Hell. ESCAPE raises some interesting questions--how, exactly, can a loving and all-powerful God be reconciled with a place of eternal punishment? Is it possible for those in Hell to learn, to become worthy of a better fate? Are demons who punish sinners simply doing God's work, or do they have objectives of their own?

Jerry Pournelle's books, in particular, have always been a bit heavy-handed when it comes to conservative politics. For the most part, however, this heavy-handedness comes within the context of an exciting story. ESCAPE FROM HELL contains all of the heavy-handed politics (there's scarcely an interest group within the Democratic party that doesn't come in for special abuse in Hell) but it lacks much of a story. We don't really feel Carpenter's need to escape from Hell or his burning desire to help others escape. Rather, he seems mostly to be enjoying the scenery and the discovery of various lawyers and politicians burning for their sins (along with the opportunity to moralize...the scientists behind banning DDT are burning because of the millions of malaria victims who would have lived had it not been for the ban). Sure it's interesting to see unintended consequences, but again, if we wanted lop-sided editorials, we'd read the Wall Street Journal, not a fantasy novel.

Hell is an interesting place. The concept of Hell raises intriguing questions about the nature of God and his relationship with humanity. Dante's INFERNO is one of the great classics of the western world, and Pournelle/Niven deserve credit for increasing interest in this fascinating epic. I wish, though, that they'd spent a lot more time outlining a plot, giving our characters some, well, character, and a bit less time listing and burning every conservative bugaboo from the past eighty years or so.

I haven't read a novel lately where the authors were so anxious to impress you with their erudition. They've read CS Lewis, they've read the life of Sylvia Plath, they've read up on Vatican II, and they really want you know it. Normally I don't mind erudition, and I'm impressed that they quote a line from Voltaire's CANDIDE in the original French. But in the process we lose sight of the basic situation that INFERNO grappled with, that a lot of people are suffering for no discernable reason. They're just part of the landscape (as, in a way, they were for Dante, who thought they belonged there). INFERNO may have had its weaknesses, and it was less erudite, but it was much the better book.

Love the authors. Loved Inferno. Almost found this one painful to read and I only finished it out of some twisted hope that it would get better - it didn't.

Plus the Kindle version had some really annoying issues. The book is about Hell and the word "Devil" was written "dev il" throughout, and there were at least another dozen words split in a similar fashion.

All in all a real disappointment.

Like many other reviewers, I vastly enjoyed the original Niven/Pournelle _Inferno_ and was happy to hear of a sequel. While I don't think this new book was all that bad, I don't think it was actually *good*, either.

Much of it strikes me as just lazily coasting along. There's a lengthy list of characters at the beginning which I think would've been better placed after the main text. I ended up really resenting that list for multiple reasons: it presents a big gob of spoilers up front, it doesn't indicate which characters were actual historical figures and which are invented, it gives the authors an excuse to neglect fully identifying some of those characters within the novel itself, and it really breaks up the narrative flow if the reader keeps referring back to the list to look up those characters' full names to get the intended impact.

The belated incorporation of Vatican II doesn't really make sense either, considering that the character list establishes the date of Allen Carpenter's death (and thus the earliest possible date for the original N/P _Inferno_ to take place) as 1975, already ten years after the council-- so the judicial process of Hell hadn't yet taken notice then, but was undergoing a complete reform within the next few decades? (Well, maybe-- this *is* literally the bureaucracy from Hell, chock-full of institutional inertia.) For that matter, there were a number of fairly major plot points that didn't make sense to me either, including a rational explanation of why/how the vast nuking of the ice takes place... an ignited metonymy of invention? if Nobel were embraced, would the result resemble dynamite?

And one last nitpick-- there were some jarring typos I noticed, and I'm usually oblivious to minor typos so these were pretty bad. I've never seen "highjacking" spelled with the GH in the first syllable, for example... on the other hand, I was weirdly delighted by a reference to "the Acadian Empire", conjuring images of a vast realm of Nouvelle France spreading outward through the Americas from what our world now calls Nova Scotia.

My advice, in brief: don't expect too much, and don't start by reading the list of characters. Hopefully that'll let you enjoy this book more than I did.

In 1976, Niven & Pournelle wrote "Inferno" a great little fantasy novel about science fiction writer Allen Carpenter who wakes up in Dante's Hell and wants to leave. Having found the way out, he decides to stay to help other souls "Escape From Hell", which leads us 33 years later to this sequel.

As Carpenter travels through Hell, he meets sinners and witnesses their penances. In the earlier novel, the emphasis was on how the punishment fit the crime. The authors didn't take a moral stand, they just gave us clever over-the-top retributions for modern trespasses.

In this sequel however the emphasis is on who is guilty and who isn't according to what Niven and Pournelle think is right and wrong, and it is so obvious that they put many people in Hell for political and religious differences.

Pournelle is a well known conservative and devout Catholic and while this is often reflected in his novels (e.g. Falkenberg's Legions) he usually lets the plot and the story express his views rather than _tell_ us what is (supposedly) right and wrong. The sort of posturing we find in "Escape..." belongs on his blog. In a novel, it is the mark of vanity "message" novelists on both the left and right.

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

I was very excited to read the continuing adventures of Allen Carpenter. I expected him to return to Hell and find answers, but what I found was a man barely worth knowing. He had no strength, no passion, just a "lets keep moving and everything will be different than it is here" mentality. That is good for story, not good for character development. Niven and Pournelle's original story seemed to seek answers of why and what Hell was for, but this story doesnt attempt to find the answers, just new characters for the authors to play with. I was entertained even if my intellect was left behind, so I do give it the benefit of a reread. Maybe I am just too ignorant of their use of historical figures and authors to have understood what the authors were attempting to communicate.

As a stand alone this novel is not too bad. As a sequel to the much superior Inferno, it is quite bad. To be fair to readers who -- more than two decades later -- may not have read Inferno I gave it three stars. But if you have read Inferno, this will likely be a let down.

Allen Carpenter is back, taking up Benny's mission of telling others about how to escape from hell. He travels top to bottom again, gathering various friends along the way and running into some old friends, such as Billy. While it was interesting to see what had happened to some of these earlier characters, none play very important parts or undergo much development in this book.

Part of the problem is that this sequel retreads much the same ground. Carpenter spends much time lamenting the punishment and hell and asking how God could let this happen and how could this be just. I thought we had gone through all this in Inferno? And if anything Carpenter seems to have regressed and lost many of the lessons he had learned before. No novel about hell could be complete without grappling with these issues, of course, but they are approached with less gravity than before.

The lack of a serious theodicy (is hell really a part of theodicy?) is all the more telling because there is nothing else important going on. In the first novel, one of the most interesting features was Carpenter's coming to terms with the existence of the supernatural, much less hell. In Inferno I could sympathize with his initial reluctance to accept the reality of his situation and thought Niven and Pournelle were at their most masterful when discussing issues of rationalism and faith. There are blushes of this as Carpenter and crew encounter figures such as Carl Sagan who seem to resist the idea as well, but they all too quickly seem to accept their new reality.

The one pleasant surprise was the character of Aimee Semple McPhereson. I assumed she would be another of the authors' convenient punching bags to be used as social commentary when they introduced her in hell, riding up on her motorcycle, shouting, "God loves you!" As it turns out, she chose to go to Hell when she learned there were stills souls to be saved there. Indeed, she seems more successful at saving souls and leading people out of hell than either Benny or Carpenter. A novel focusing on her exploits would have been worth reading!