Customer Reviews

Night Of Light

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This was a bizarre freaky ready! Truly nothing else like this one out there. Like an LSD trip from beginning to end, as Farmer uses many images and scenes that were frightening and almost psychotic at times. Make sure you read this one if you are a Farmer fan!

every seven years , the placid planet of dante's joy becomes a waking nightmare of death,deformity and madness.to escape,the populace has a choice of sleeping - lying drugged in their tomblike houses,or taking the chance - staying awake & going abroad while their world goes berserk... john carmody , a conscienceless exile from earth ,arrogantly chooses to take the chance... this book is a mad sci-fi , lots of crazy things going on all the time , i got tired of it in the middle ...

Rarely do I read a book and wish that there was more to it, but this one has so many possibilities and unanswered questions that I get the feeling that it was a 400 page book that was compressed into a 150 page potboiler. At first you think that it's going to be about the Ordeal that the back cover mentions. Carmody, the protagonist, is a remorseless sociopath who has kiled his wife, spent years as a smuggler and ended up on Dante's Joy almost by accident. The book takes great pains to tell you what the ordeal is going to be - a week long time of psychic energy where everyone's personal demons come out and they must deal with their issues. Most die and several are transformed into monsters (one example is a man who became a tree through the Night to much speculation over whether or not that was his greatest wish). Carmody is particularly troubled since he is seeing physical manifestations of his dead wife. There's also a planetary religion that is Manicheanism made flesh as the good god rules but during any one of these "nights" he could be replaced by the evil god. THe fact that the god grews old and dies and chooses 7 fathers is a major plot point.

ANyhow after the first third of the book, Carmody goes through the Ordeal, changes himself and becomes a major bishop in the Catholic church. At this point, there are several questions that don't ever get answered including why he chose Catholicism instead of the Dante's Joy faith (which isn't so mysterious, since people have different spiritual journeys and if they start out their spiritual journey one way it doesn't necessarily mean that they will choose it as a religion. For example, I started out a Lutheran and I was into Scientology when I was in high school. NOw I'm an Orthodox Jew.), what was the experience and how does he handle the fact that he has a conscience. There's a couple of plots going on throughout the last 2/3 of the book including the good god's attempt to put everyone through the Ordeal and the family of someone that he murdered trying to wreak revenge on him. There's also the weird thing about the planet having a good god and an evil god and it strikes me as rather weak in the same way that the Slytherin House in the Harry Potter universe is the house solely for evil wizards - which seems rather counterproductive.

This is a fine book but I wish that he had more time to delve further into the issues that he raises concerning guilt, life changing experiences and good and evil. I give it four stars but I wish that there was a longer version of this book out there.

Night of Light was what I would call a "detailed outline" for a story. I find that's typical of a lot of the earlier science fiction novels, though since this one was published in 1972, it probably shouldn't fall into that category.

But it did feel, all the way through, that we were really being told the main character's story more as observers, than really getting into his mind and emotions. When his thoughts and emotions were touched on, they were described rather than demonstrated. So it kept feeling, to me, like the description of the plot of a story, rather than the living unfolding of the story.

With all that said, it was still a very good plot outline. The world and the religion Farmer created were fascinating. (That was one reason I was disappointed that we didn't really get deeply into it, but were kept at arms' length.) I was rather disconcerted by the abrupt ending, but after a while I thought, "Oh, I get it." It leaves a very important question wide open, and that's thoroughly appropriate, since it's not a question that can really be answered.

So it's an okay book. I just feel like it could have been better written. Which of course will be blasphemy to Farmer fans! But this book definitely felt typical of a fault I sometimes find in "earlier SF:" that the ideas are so interesting that the actual writing gets a pass, and doesn't have to be tht good.