Subject: Review: THE EXILE KISS by George Alec Effinger

From: [email-masked]
Date: 20 Aug 91 20:54:39 GMT

THE EXILE KISS
		       by George Effinger
		Critique Copyright (c) 1991 Alan Wexelblat

%A George Alec Effinger
%T The Exile Kiss
%I Foundation/Doubleday
%G ISBN 0-385-4124-2
%O large-format paperback $11
%D 1991

I shall attempt to critique, rather than review, this book.  I assume you
have read the book and its prequels.  If not, at least don't get suckered
into paying $11 for this one, as I did.

EXILE KISS is the third book in the story of Marid Audran and the
future-world Budayeen he inhabits.  The first book, WHEN GRAVITY FAILS,
introduced us to Audran when he was a mere street hustler in the Budayeen.
Or, rather, Audran introduced himself.  The story -- now three books long,
with at least one more on the way -- is narrated by Audran.  This is, I
think, one of it's major faults.  The second book, A FIRE IN THE SUN, showed
Audran's rise to lieutenant of Friedlander Bey, one of the two most powerful
men in the city.  EXILE KISS is an adventure through which Audran develops
himself.

Let me set up some background for this critique.  I liked WHEN GRAVITY FAILS
-- it had the freshness of the Arab setting, the interesting twists on
cyberpunk themes and it drew strength from Effinger's ability to let a story
tell itself.  I liked FIRE IN THE SUN less; it was too wordy, and it smacked
too much of middle-of-trilogy-ness, wherein the author manipulates the
characters into the right positions so that he can set up the denoument he
wants.

EXILE KISS's first failing is that it doesn't deliver that denoument.  It
is, essentially, a sideshow to the story of Marid Audran.  In order to do
this, Effinger has to bring Friedlander Bey back from the brink of death.
Recall that at the end of FIRE, Bey was nearly dead and had suffered severe
neural damage from a poison (never mind that anyone with two ounces of brain
power could have figured out where the poison was coming from).  But at the
beginning of EXILE, Bey is all but recovered.  The poisoning is mentioned
once or twice early in the book, then forgotten.

The second major failing is that Effinger decided to discard traditional
linear narrative.  Nothing wrong with that, in and of itself.  But instead,
he has replaced it with a style wherein Audran tells his own story as a
series of flashbacks.  The plot leaps ahead, then Effinger comes up with
some excuse for Audran to explain (often in ploddingly unnecessary detail)
how they got to this point.  For example, the point where Audran wakes up in
the Bedu tent: Effinger has to give him a totally-unnecessary case of
amnesia so that he can spend the next three chapters slowly remembering how
he got into that tent.

Needless to say, this totally destroys any sense of suspense that the book
might have had.  The detailed descriptions and lush narrative would have
been fine if we didn't already know how they were going to turn out.  More
than once I found myself skimming.

The last major annoyance comes from the fact that Audran is telling his own
story.  This seems to require him to notice, frequently and in great boring
detail, how much his adventures are changing him.  As it happened, my wife
and I read this book aloud to each other as we drove from Boston to D.C.
More than once, one of us would read a "boy, have I changed!" paragraph and
the other would ask something along the lines of "Didn't you read that
section before?"  At one point, we counted six of these self-examinations in
two hours of driving.

Yes, the book has its good points.  I must disagree with Budrys' assessment
(in the June F&SF) that Effinger's future is not believable.  Budrys asserts
that Islam and "cosmopolitan culture" are incompatible.  I find the
combination of fundamentalist Islam and high-tech decadence to be utterly
believable.  Today's modern Arab governments are threatened by rising
fundamentalist tides.  It it completely possible that they would adopt the
facade of faithful belief in order to placate the population while
continuing their worldly ways.  When today's Arab oil sheiks jet around the
world, many of them still carry their prayer rugs and stop business when it
is time to pray.

And, lest the point be not obvious by now, I also disagree with Budrys'
assertion that this is "...a rather good book."  It's not.  It's a rather
bad book by a rather good author from whom I hope to see much better things
in the future.