The Physiognomy [Import] [Paperback]

Jeffrey Ford (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Tor; paperback / softback edition (2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330413198
• ISBN-13: 978-0330413190
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,299,333 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mixed feelings . . ., December 3, 2001

By 

Luís Rodrigues "blackgoblin" (Lisbon, Portugal) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Physiognomy (Mass Market Paperback)

I have mixed feelings about Jeffrey Ford's science fantasy novel The Physiognomy. While I rank it above the average, it's still frustrating to read a book with so much potential so needlessly wasted. Jeffrey Ford had great ideas for it but I didn't like the way he handled many of them. I'll let you know about my biggest gripes in a minute, so keep reading.

For this review, I split the novel into three parts. Act one is, in my humble opinion, the best chunk of the book. Here we witness as Cley, renowned physiognomist of the Well-Built City -- the urban brainchild of overlord genius Drachton Below --, is sent to the rural landscapes at the edge of the known world on a trifling mission he's not very pleased to carry out. Cley is a cruel and conceited individual, intelligent but at the same time blinded by his own knowledge and an addiction to a drug known as Sheer Beauty. With a charming personality such as this, it's no surprise he vents his frustrations on the hapless peasants, whom he rates pathetic creatures after only a quick glance at their physiognomic traits. Jeffrey Ford shows great talent for dark humour in his portrayal of Cley, but it's a pity it only lasts for the first part of the novel. Granted, Cley isn't a character you could easily identify yourself with, but I still liked him a lot at this stage. (...)

Cley is also perhaps the only truly well-developed character in The Physiognomy, while all the others seem flat by comparison. Unfortunately for him, though, things are about to change.

The story goes a bit downhill from here. Luckily not into the Forbidden Zone of Badness, but downhill nevertheless. For starters, things happen too damn fast at times, especially from the second act on. Jeffrey Ford seems in a hurry to finish the book, and its scanty 244 pages add to that impression.

During the second part of the novel, Cley endures a set of conditions that gradually change him into a man of healthier disposition. Possibly because the narrative seems so rushed, his moral metamorphosis felt awkward to me. Not unlikely, but still awkward. Or perhaps the surrealism of the world around Cley made it feel that way, I don't know. What I think is a pity is that the protagonist begins to flatten and lose complexity as a result. Oops. On the other hand, Jeffrey Ford writes up some more cool concepts, fewer than in the first part, but fortunately not as squandered.

The third act gives us Cley's return to Drachton Below's Well-Built City. Without going into particulars for the sake of spoilers, I'll just say I didn't appreciate the novel's kind-of vacuous antiscientific message, nor did I like to see Cley made into a wimp at the end. The rating goes down a notch here as far as I'm concerned, though I understand other people's views on the subject might vary.

Like I mentioned at the start of the review, The Physiognomy boasts quite a few first-class concepts -- I'll tell you of Drachton Below's pet, a clockwork-animated werewolf, just to tease your appetite. Sadly, Ford leaves a trail of undeveloped ideas behind, instead exploring those I wouldn't like to go into -- for instance, he describes an expedition to Paradise in more detail than I'd have cared to have. The bottom-line is he ended up murdering the whole thing's sense of wonder for nothing, and any author who pulls one of those without a pretty damned good reason gives me cause to lop a couple of points off the book's score.

So, when the time comes to fill your shopping cart, is this book worth picking up? I'd say yes. The Physiognomy is an original and interesting read in spite of its flaws, the mass market paperback is cheap, and the whole thing wouldn't take you more than an idle weekend afternoon to finish. Personally, I'd encourage you to give it a try. You might even like it better than I did.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Falls short of expectations., March 24, 2001

By 

Alex (College Park, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Physiognomy (Mass Market Paperback)

Don't believe anyone who says that "The Physiognomy" is irresistibly entertaining. For the first seventy or so pages (a good portion of this 200-page book) I had to resist the urge to toss this of Jeffrey Ford's creations across the room. The viewpoint character, one Physiognomist Cley, is a tough pill to swallow from page one: he believes himself the very crown of creation, and harbors a deep loathing for everyone else; he literally has to supress the urge to punch his partners in conversation; he is a notorious drug addict, and has protracted hallucinations every few pages; at night, he dreams of kicking people in the seat of the pants. The lugubrious arrogance and aloof cynicism of his narration instantly kills any pretense of fun.

For a good while it seems that Mr. Ford's only gift is that for surprisingly original juxtapositions, with virtually no substance connecting them. The novel's setting can be loosely termed as "steampunk"; the reader relishes in the well realized originality of the semi-divine Drachton Below and his toy metropolis, his perverse clockwork zombies, the outlying forests filled with all sorts of Bosch demons, and the tiny frontier villages filled with slowly calcifying miners. Unfortunately, there is little or nothing connecting this imagery, and the entire novel has an unrealistic, dream-like quality to it: Ford's sulfur mines hardly seem like such a horrible place (despite the fumes, Cley doesn't seem to develop TB, and at night he relaxes in a pleasant cottage with a monkey butler), and the bulk of his characters seem to be automata. For a while I hoped that the emerging metaphysical elements would connect into a unified whole by the end, lending the book a somewhat lasting impression. I ever built up an entire scheme of cyclicity and time loops which seems to fit the novel quite well, but, no, I was wrong: the novel ends without resolving many of the reader's questions, focusing on the prosaic matters instead.

Mr. Ford's "The Physiognomy" sorely lacks a definite mythos. It fails miserably as a novel about characters, and doesn't have enough to make it a novel about ideals.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic, But Not For Everyone, December 30, 1999

By 

David Langford (Madison, WI, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Physiognomy (Paperback)

Most people who pick up the book will probably be confounded by its uncompromising vision, and most of those who aren't will be offended by its unflinching sensibility. The rest will have to admit that the book is bizarre at the least. But the prose is so good that the experience of it is almost like reading poetry (don't worry, you won't notice if you don't like poetry), and many chapters have a closure that almost makes them stories of their own, even while leading the reader further into the labyrinth of the story. As a whole the book is a stunning vision of an alternative -- really alternative -- reality, and although the ending was not perfectly satisfying to me, the book is nevertheless a brave and brilliant achievement, and very much worth reading.