Customer Reviews

Night Lamp

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

For those who loved Vance's 70s classics such as Marune, Wyst, Emphryio, Trullian and others, this one will fit in your hand like a well worn glove. It will also suit the readers of the Amarminta Station books, although it is better. The plot is generally the same as all of them: a decent young man falls into bad circumstances and emerges victorious after a series of wild adventures.

Like Vance's later works this one is longer, and incorporates more elements of mystery than the early tales from the Gaen Reach. All of the standard Vance themes are there, to include the revenge of evil deeds, sly and appealing young women, travels through colorful and bizarre lands, unusual cultural depravities, and a young man's emergence from innocence to realism and competance. The Vance humor shows itself as always; in a comic farce, a series of lectures given by academics quickly disintegrates into name-calling and mayhem.

Vance is at his best, however, when describing alien cultures that are completely foreign to any present or past human condition, yet completely believable. Hes given us that here as well, with a series of societies that seem all too likely.

Is this one of Vance's very best? I've just read it, and I need a little time to let it settle in. For those of you who may be new to Vance, however, you may have little choice since a lot of his very best is no longer readily available.

If you are a reader with that special attraction for Vance's writing style & subtle humor (you know it if you are one), you already own this book, and all that I write here is redundant to you. If you HAVEN'T read The Dying Earth, The Blue World, The Dragon Masters, or Emphyrio - then you may need to be enticed to read Night Lamp. This latest work is classic Vance - he has included the expected imagery, biting humor and social commentary, and singular style of dialog & description. The story unfolds into gratifying resolution of conflicts & mysteries, with a dose of surprise & tragedy for dessert. I liked Night Lamp very much, and I'm waiting for my recollection of the story's details to dissipate, so that I can read it again. Night Lamp is unique in that it's my only Vance book which has been read but once ... A very temporary condition, I assure you, as I re-read while waiting for Ports of Call. A great story by a man who is, in my opinion, the most skilled manipulator of language in the business of creating and constructing speculative fiction.

Night Lamp will be satisfying to Vance fans: it is Science Fiction in Vance's most familiar style, elegantly written, full of ironic bits, often downright funny, portraying at least three complex social structures based on intricate manners. It also shares the weaknesses of much of Vance's work: it is discursive, the Science content is notional at best (for instance, his spaceships seem basically to be automobiles that can fly in space and travel at many multiples of the speed of light without relativistic effects), and it seemed short one rewrite.

The story is that of Jaro Fath, a young boy who is found, on the remote planet of Camberwell, by Hilyer and Anthea Fath, while in the process of being beaten nearly to death by local thugs. The Faths rescue Jaro, and in the process of restoring him to health it is necessary that his memory of the first six years of his life be erased. Hilyer and Anthea take Jaro back to their home world of Gallingale, where they are somewhat unconventional (by Gallingale standards) university professors, and they raise Jaro as their son.

Jaro grows up intelligent and strong, but his life is complicated by several factors. He hears voices in his head which seem to be associated with his early life. His ambition to become a spaceman and seek out the mysteries of the lost six years of his life is thwarted as much as possible by the Faths, who fear that he will come to grief tracing his apparently violent history. And he inherits from the Faths disdain for the social system of Gallingale, which is based on the concept of "striving" up social "ledges", trying to reach clubs of higher and higher status. This disdain leads to conflict with his fellow students, and naturally seems to increase his interest in a classmate (Skirlet Hutsenreiter, a wonderful name!) who is hereditarily a Clam Muffin: that is, a member of one of the highest ranked clubs.

As Jaro comes to maturity, he slowly learns more and more about his past, and of course is eventually free to track down the mystery of his birth and how he came to be alone on Camberwell. However, as I said, the plot is discursive, and the resolutions seem too often to be the result of coincidence. Often great difficulties melt out of Jaro's way. Furthermore, the climaxes of the book (there are a few) seem muffled: and the final climax is not that of the original plot problem but of one introduced only a few tens of pages prior to the end. That said, the book is interesting to read throughout, and Jaro's story is romantic and is resolved more or less satisfactorily.

The prose style is a true joy: Vance is his inimitable self. His writing has a reputation for ornateness, but it seems to me that his sentences are in fact simple, well constructed, and often relatively short. The ornateness comes from the wonderful names (of characters, of stars and planets, of the clubs on Gallingale), and from the elegance and formality of the writing, including the dialect. Vance's work has usually, it seems to me, had an ironic edge: this book has full measure of irony, and is also often much more forthrightly funny than many of his novels.

As I approach the dreaded half-century I remember fondly the wonderful SF from so many of the classic writers, but Vance in particular. His command (and invention) of the language is approximated only by Zelazny's, and his ability to create wonderfully outlandish cultures is on a level far beyond anyone else's. I LOVED Night Lamp. It has a quality of odd innocence that characterizes much of Vance's work (including most of the Gaen Reach work) that is entirely appealing in a way that takes me back to the juveniles of my youth and just really makes me feel good.

I confess I was pleasantly surpised at how good this was, and my appetite is fully engaged. Come on, Jack, you can do it again!

Jack Vance has always enjoyed reading mysteries more than science fiction and wishes he could have written more in the mystery genre. His science fiction novels are riddled with sly flourishes that remind one of mystery greats such as Agatha Christie; indeed, more than a few of his sci-fi works are really mysteries in disguise. This is certainly true of Night Lamp, which includes a segment strongly reminiscent of P.D. James' An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (James' youthful private inquiry agent, Cordelia Gray, becomes the female galactic effectuator Skirl). Anyone who enjoys the upcoming PBS television series based on James' character (to be aired in April 1998) is strongly urged to buy Night Lamp and meet Cordelia's 31st century AD sister in arms.

Skirl is not Vance's first female sleuth; she has predecessors in Wayness Tamm (Ecce and Old Earth) and Jean Parlier (Monsters in Orbit). Still, effectuator Skirl is Vance's first female who is more than an inspired amateur; i.e., who undergoes professional training and aspires to a sleuthy career. And a delightful creation she is!

Night Lamp is vintage Vance with alien landscapes, adolescent misfits, neurotic civilizations, and clever rogues. Don't expect a tight plot; the charm of Vance novel's depends in large part on their rambling, picaresque quality which enables Vance to pack as many oddities as possible into each volume.

Buy this book. Cherish it. Tell everyone you know to read it.

Jack Vance reintroduces many of his past themes: a decadent society (The Dying Earth), a hero seeking his own identity (Marune), and the symbology of caste and status (The Big Planet, and many more). As always, his style is rich and poetic. There is strife, both physical and mental, and growth of the characters, and the societies with which they interact. Set loosely in the same universe as the Alastor novels and The Grey Prince, a youth raised by foster parents deals with his own lack of identity and the values of his society. There are overtones of the Vance hero from the Planet of Adventure and Wyst. The youth becomes an adult with complex relationships and friends. He resolves the question of his identity, overthrows a stagnant culture (The Last Castle) and faces physical and emotional challenges alone and with the help of friends. This is an exquisite read, it does not pound brutally (as did the golem in Green Magic), but it is engrossing and fulfilling. "Beauty beyond measure, and joy beyond all expectations." Get it. Read it. Give it to your friends.

The emotional clock of human aging measures the deaths of those we love and the extent of our inability to understand those younger than ourselves. As we zoom to 2000 and the SF mills belch out an endless mass of dark and anti-intellectual landfill-bound material, we can still re-read our Vance novels and take joy when Father Time grants us one more. The loss of Carl Sagan and Issac Asimov revealed to me what is to come.....one day I will read the last Vance story. wish@nr.infi.net describes "Night Lamp" well, all I add is that I hope that this is not the final legacy.

The review in Interzone said it all: "Rush out and buy this glorious book!" At age 80, Vance has lost none of his inventiveness and demonstrates he is still one of the finest prose stylists writing in the English language.

Well, how would I know - I'm a long way from having read them all. But I'm sure it's a candidate. Of the ones I've read it's the hardest to describe without giving something away that is better kept secret. Even the signifigance of the title isn't revealed until well after the halfway mark. I will say that, so far as I can tell, all of the instruments in the Vance orchestra sound at least once; and we are treated to both tragedy and farce and several things, like the background sensation of chilling weirdness, that aren't even in between. I wish I could say what the highlights are without spoiling the surprise.

This is perhaps the final Vance book and seems a distillation of his science fiction. We see familiar themes and characters and plot devices, but they are lingered over and touched with even more bittersweet irony than is his wont. Perhaps not the greatest Vance, but still a wonderful book. A book full of wonders. It is written in a slower pace than usual and is somehow sweeter and warmer. A legacy, not a firework