Flight from Nevèrÿon

I read the first three volumes over the week. I don't think I'll be going on to the fourth just yet, but I may come back to it. There are going to be spoilers in this review.

Delany writes philosophical novels. Or perhaps he pastiches philosophical novels. Plato's dialogues lie behind several sections and almost the whole of volume 2 can be read as a cheerful response to Sade's 'Justine' Voltaire, Dostoevsky, and Anton Wilson drift in and out of the text. The author tackles psychology - mostly Freudian - economics (he's almost certainly wrong about the evolution from barter to money, which he seems to see as very important in the first volume, but which happily doesn't get much in the way of the rest of the series), literary theory and much, much more. Some of this rides with the story, but there are long passages which the reader may find pretentious, boring or mundane, depending on how much patience she has for academic quibbling.

Delany's lead character is the leader of a slave revolt - and comes across as a Staggerlee as in Nick Cave's version of the tale. It is a little mysterious as to why he acts as he does; in several places throughout the books it is suggested that slavery is, in any case, pretty much a thing of the past. And indeed, this rather peculiar hero never seems to do very much, slipping clandestinely from place to place, and holding meetings which finish in mayhem, as those he has - perhaps - betrayed discourage would-be followers and attempt to assassinate him. When he does move into action, he is as much concerned to realize his Hegelo-Sadian sexual fantasies as to make much difference to the wider world around him. Delany spends pages and pages on his fornications, particularly with his successive lieutenants, but relatively little on his political and military campaigns. And once Delaney has wound him up in the first book, he is pretty much left to tick his way through the following two as a background figure that gradually takes less and less space.

Delany is very much interested in gender questions, and several of the leading characters are women, particularly in the second volume. At one point, the heroine, a happier Justine, who is prone to embracing her opportunities rather than running away from them, finds herself caught up in a four-way drama of passion, setting up a rather interesting set of characters who then just disappear from view, to leave space for a rather pointless fellow who takes on the heroine's role as victim.

The third volume is perhaps the most intriguing and successful of the three, and its final section, which winds back and forth from the fantasy world to New York at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, is, for the most part, wonderfully done.