Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Evil Guest...with interesting recreational drugs, October 15, 2008
This is going to be a hard book to review and I suspect that the ratings will be all across the board. Some people are going to hate it, some like it, and many more will just be confused. I'm in the last camp, but despite being confused, I must say I liked and enjoyed this book.
The downside of An Evil Guest is that this book is extremely disjointed, not very clear, and parts seem missing. I truly wondered as I was reading this if Mr. Wolfe didn't thrash this out while on some very interesting medications. The upside is that the book grabbed my attention and I enjoyed reading it despite what I might normally call serious flaws. So this is hard to explain. I'm not sure I understood the story, I'm not sure who the evil guest was, I'm not sure what the heck Wolderan had to do with anything, and despite being set 100 years in the future I could detect no trace of that in the book other than that some people had personal spaceships. Other than that, and they didn't have any bearing on the plot, it could have been 1999. In fact, I am not even sure this book has a plot. The musings in the early part of the book regarding good and evil never bear fruit, fun forays into sentient mountains and werewolves never seem to amount to anything and the two Alpha males, Gideon and Reis, never deliver on their promise. The dialogue left me so confused that at many points in the book I had to go back and re-read a sequence three or four times to understand it. It often felt like reading a play without any of the visual cues, mostly because Wolfe didn't add much in the way of descriptions throughout the book. Ready to run away? Not so fast. Somehow I enjoyed this book. I've read several books in the last month that I didn't enjoy at all, but I actually enjoyed this one and even the complete lack of a comprehensible ending didn't take the blush off the rose.
So what is about this book? It reminded me of nothing so much as if Hunter S. Thompson, whacked out on good acid and bad whiskey during a broadway show, started writing a science fiction book right in the theater and then finished it over the course of a jittery and spastic night. The book is extremely disorienting, but it is disorienting in a recognizable way. It may not make a ton of sense, but think about a long and interesting dream you may have had once. This book comes as close as anything I've ever read to being like a dream. It doesn't have a lot of logic, things show up which have no relevance, characters change and morph over time for no particular reason, the story changes and goes to bizarre places and the end is like waking up to a different reality. Which is always disorienting. Nominally this book is about an actress, Cassie Casey, who does theatre and gets caught up in the maneuverings of two wealthy, powerful, interesting and dangerous males who are both being hunted by the US government. Kind of. That's as close to a plot as you're going to get and the story wanders away from it frequently.
So, if you have had fabulous, disjointed random dreams before, I think you may like this book. That's exactly what the reading experience is like. I enjoyed this book despite it ignoring every convention out there, but I think to enjoy this one you just have to let go and flow with the book. This is very odd stuff, but if you don't fight it you may enjoy it.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
brilliant fun..., November 25, 2008
An Evil Guest follows other recent Wolfe novels (Pirate Freedom, Wizard/Knight) that pastiche various fantasy or SF forms of the past. Unlike the others I just mentioned, Evil Guest is broader in ambition and more more true to its (multiplicity of) sources.
At its core, Evil Guest is basically a Hammett or Chandler "mystery" thriller circa 1930. The style, use of dialog, basic milieu, and plotting would feel right at home next to the Big Sleep or Maltese Falcon. Yet we have a completely modern world also (with cell phones, the Internet, etc.), plus 1950's Buck Rodgers space opera elements and some Cthulhu mythologizing thrown in for good measure.
If this sounds dubious, crackpot, haphazard, or just plain impossible... well... it's Gene Wolfe, here. It's not just eminently possible, it all works to build tension and gravity---not knowing who precisely our heroine should trust or whether/how it will work out until the end. The disparate elements and homages (with one exception) play seamlessly together, blending into the whole nicely. (The one exception, for me at least, is the mention of Miskatonic University in the Epilogue: begone, blatant mention!)
If you love Wolfe's "Book of the {whatever} Sun", the Latro stories, and are here for the unreliable narrator, Byzantine plotting, and 57-layers of indecipherable meaning (and you didn't like, say, Pirate Freedom), you might not enjoy this book. The tautness of the genre and the nature of the book will *seem* to deny you those myriad pleasures. I say "seem" because I think he's doing something pretty remarkable without the sundry tricks. I don't love it quite as much as some of Wolfe's earlier works. But I was steadfastly entertained and I liked where this went, indeed indeed.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Gene Wolfe, thin and lean, December 26, 2008
It was hardly twenty pages into "An Evil Guest" that I realized: "my god, this is the very first Gene Wolfe novel I've read that's proven to be a chore!" (In the interest of full disclosure, I'd only read the Book of the New Sun, The Urth of the New Sun, and the Wizard Knight duo previously) It was a chore, and seemed to be, well, boring. How could such a thing be?
I believe it is because he has tried to strike out on a new stylistic path, trying some new authorial clothes: clothes that fit him not well at all. There are distinct differences between An Evil Guest (from hereon in described as AEG) and his previous works. For one thing, he follows a female protagonist. For another, the narrative descriptions and tone seem to be entirely cut-out. Finally, there just seems to be an overall lack of dread: he's taken Cthulhu and turned him into a Kraken, taken werewolves and turned them into pets. Perhaps the most sinister of the characters, a private investigator/wizard character is turned into a generic love interest, although to be fair to the old author by the end of the book his presence takes on a new light.
I think that most of the problems stem from the fact that Wolfe has tried to explore a female main-character based story. The great element from many of Wolfe's books has been transformation: the transformation of Severian, the metamorphosis of Able from a boy into a man. Cassie also undergoes a transformation--she is turned into a theater star. But while the transformations of Able and Severian were well-handled, and gave rise to wish-fulfillment tinged tinged with depth and drama, the female wish-fulfillment he seeks to illustrate stikes me as more cheesy than weighty. Her "star presence" as it is depicted is often so over the top to strain credulity. Perhaps a woman would be better suited to let me know if Wolfe has adroitly plumbed the motivations, desires, and dreams of femininity.
You know, while I could remember Able and Severian off the top of my head, a mere day after reading AEG I had to flip through the book to remind myself of Cassie's name. Again, a lack of dread and real, potent danger permeates much the book, the last fifty pages perhaps aside. Wolfe clearly draws on 1930s and 1940s era culture, but did he have to bring the lack of scares from these times with him? Perhaps his affection has blinded him to the relative toothlessness of many (though not all) plots from his childhood. Even when dread and danger does seem to come, he resurrects along with it islander caricatures which are painful to a young, modern reader: I grimaced. Actually, this element is present even earlier; AEG features a computer with a Japanese accent just as ham-fisted as Mickey Rooney's Mr. Yunioshi in "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Sigh.
Just as AEG takes on a female protagonist, so does it take on a different style than earlier Wolfe works. Gone are lengthy blocks of rich, detail-filled narration. In its place are endless reams of dialogue, dialogue, dialogue. You could argue that this is appropriate, as the book is about stagecraft, but however appropriate this style may be to the theme of the novel, it doesn't change the fact that it is a style which is tremendously easy to put down and set aside. I turned the pages of this novel begrudgingly, on the basis of the earned reputation of the author.
There are moments of great imagination. There are times when the vivid imagery which Wolfe is so expertly capable of come through, and there are certainly mysteries piled on top of mysteries to be explored in the text. But when the flavor of the work itself comes off as so relatively bland. After I finished reading the book, I slept and had a very interesting dream, so I suppose the text is worthwhile in some regard.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
