Customer Reviews

The Violent Man

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This novel, by a respectable pulp-era scifi writer, presents the reader with an unrealistic vision of a Cold War Chinese prison camp and has a plot with lots of corny cliches suitable for a James Bond film. It has the significant virtue of containing clear and punchy prose which follows the conventions of mid-20th-century scifi. Also, it moves along at a decent pace so as not be boring.

What is noteworthy about this book is that Van Vogt did extensive research into the behavior of violent men and integrated the information into this novel. His research included the reading of many divorce cases from the New York courts, and collating these case studies with information from more conventional sources.

The fruit of this labor is a section of this book called 'The Right Man' (which was the original title of this novel). The term Right Man comes from the fact that the classic violent man always considers himself to be Right, in terms of his views, opinions, and his conflicts with others, and that this fixed perspective is one of the key components of the violent personality.

Ten years of my professional career were spent treating the issues of family violence, and the Right Man section remains, more than 50 since the publication, a remarkably coherent composite portrait of the Violent Man. It is not, of course, 100% accurate, but for the most part it fits and it remains fascinating to this day.

And perhaps somewhat more fascinating is one of the book's implicit ideas: these violent men, running roughshod over their families, are merely small-scale templates for the rulers of the world.

In this book, a group of foreign(non-Chinese) prisoners in communist China are sent to a prison camp where they are to be converted to communists. In many respects this book is well-written and fascinating. I was very interested in the descriptions of the methods by the communists to gain control of China and turn the people into communists as well as descriptions of some of the brainwashing techniques used.

However, I was ultimately dissatisfied with the book. The way the women threw themselves at the main character was unbelievable. Also, the analysis of the personality of what is called the "right" man or terrorist type seems flawed, particularly the assumption that any terrorist type will succumb to serious illness or death if he is left by his wife.

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This is a very strange book. In form, it's a standard Cold War Red Menace/Yellow Peril political thriller. But this is a van Vogt book, so the plot advances in small, dreamlike steps. And the characters are *aliens*, albeit human-shaped aliens, born of.... well, born of van Vogt's very peculiar imagination.

The maguffin is Operation "Future Victory", an alt-hist Red Chinese experiment in brainwashing, for the future conquest of the whites by the yellow Reds (his language -- it's a book of its time). The scene is a remote Chinese political prison, sometime in an alternate 1950's. The Reds have sentenced a group of about twenty Europeans, and two Americans, to death --unless they can convince their captors they've become good Communists. The prison Commandant has set up notional three-month checkpoints -- no progress towards becoming a good Red (or piss off the Commandant) and it's the firing squad for you, boyo. The Commandant has total despotic power over the prisoners, and is a veteran of thousands of executions in the great purges following the Chi-com takeover. Shooting the odd European, pour encourager les autres, doesn't faze him a bit.

Our Hero is an American, Ruxton, the titular Violent Man and a standard-issue van Vogt 'human' (=alien) superman. He's irresistible to alien-human women -- shortly after his arrival in the prison-camp, he accepts the plea of a beautiful Japanese girl, the Commandant's wife's maid, to be her lover. Soon after that, he's servicing the wife, too. Van Vogt's women are even more alien than his men, which is even more striking in this nominally non-fantastic novel, than in his SF.

Van Vogt did a lot of research for this novel -- he appends a three-page bibliography. But his vision of Red China has only occasional congruences to that country in our timeline. I'm certainly no expert on Chinese prison-camps. But the whole atmosphere of the camp is fantastic -- the prisoners have private rooms, in an old hotel. They can wander about freely, even socialize with the locals in a nearby village. They're fed three hot meals a day -- Porterhouse steak, on special occasions.... You be the judge, but I've never heard of such a prison. Mind you, things get nasty (and weird) at the prison, later on.

Unfortunately, the book runs off the rails in the last third, particularly with the ending, which stretched even my very flexible WSOD way past the breaking point. Van Vogt spends way too much time on his "right (violent) man" theory, which is too incoherent and loopy to sum up in a sentence, and not worth my time to sort out [1]. The weird dialogue and weird behavior of these alleged humans finally got to me, too. These fantastic elements (sfaict) are unintended.

Should you read it? Probably not, unless you're a van Vogt completist. It's just too odd, and too dated. It did get good reviews when it was published -- judging from the excerpt-blurbs on the cover.

Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman
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[1] phinnweb.blogspot.com/2004_10_01_phinnweb_archive.html
"[Colin] Wilson discusses the interesting psychological concept of the "Right Man", which might in other uses also be called the "Dominant Male" or the "Alpha Male"..." Wilson makes a lot more sense than van Vogt -- this does appear to be a valid "theory of monsters." Too bad van Vogt wasn't able to make this work as a fiction device.

Ruxton turned torture and brain washing inside out. He used their own subtle techniques against his cruel Oriental captors. THE VIOLENT MAN is one of the most startling novels of our time. It is part of that electrifying tradition that produced THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and THE GREEN BERETS. It is the remarkable story of a man who pitted himself against the brains of a nation, the might of an army, and the demands of two erotic, insatiable women.