Subject: David Zindell: THE BROKEN GOD

From: [email-masked] (Gareth Rees)
Date: Sun, 28 Aug 1994 23:22:16 GMT

The Broken God by David Zindell
		     A book review by Gareth Rees
		  Copyright (c) 1994 by Gareth Rees

     "The Broken God" is a sequel to Zindell's 1989 novel "Neverness",
a novel that seemed for me at least, to capture the excitement and
enthusiasm I felt at the time for such diverse ideas as the philosophy
of mathematics, theories of consciousness, arguments for and against
machine intelligence, ecological holism and the Gaia hypothesis and so
on.  It received rave reviews from such diverse figures as Orson Scott
Card and John Clute.  I wrote a rave review myself.

     But a sequel?  A sequel, moreover, that proudly proclaims itself
"Book One of David Zindell's new epic trilogy, 'A Requiem for Homo
Sapiens'"?  I suppose the only surprising thing is that I'm still
capable of getting angry about this.  But I am angry that a good
writer like Zindell, having exerted his imagination once, is content
to sit back and do no more than write more of the same.

     "The Broken God" is about 200 pages longer than "Neverness", but
has only about a third of the amount of plot and character that went
into the earlier novel.  The rest of the bulk is taken up by
philosophical longuers and much discussion of the relatively few
events.  The main viewpoint character is Mallory's son Danlo (Mallory
was the viewpoint character in "Neverness"; Danlo was supposed dead at
the end of that book) who grows up with a tribe of Neanderthal-like
Alaloi, but when his entire tribe is suddenly and unexpectedly wiped
out by a plague he journeys by dogsled across the frozen seas to the
city of Neverness, where he is befriended and taken in by a Fravashi
(these being a race of philosophical aliens) who takes on the tasks of
civilising Danlo, teaching him language, and doing all the other
things that have to be done in novels of this sort before an initially
savage character can enter into a futuristic milieu.  Danlo is
brilliant and gifted, enters the College of starship Pilots, and
befriends another high-flier, Hanuman, to the accompaniment of lots of
foreshadowing of their becoming enemies later in the book.  They both
become involved in a religion that worships Mallory.  They become
enemies.  Danlo decides to set off on a long quest that we suppose
will take him the better part of volume two.  End of volume one.

     This just isn't good enough.  It's filled with lazy and cliched
plotting, including:

     * The viewpoint character is an outsider to whom the society of
Neverness is unfamiliar.  This is a time-honoured device providing the
reader an easy introduction to a complex invented milieu, but it's
patently unnecessary here as the reader of "The Broken God" almost
certainly read "Neverness" first and in any case "Neverness" was
perfectly understandable without such an outsider.

     * A noble savage from a 'primitive' society acts as a foil for a
complex but venal and corrupt civilisation.

     * The viewpoint character is befriended by an alien father figure
who expounds a vaguely Eastern philosophy.

     * The viewpoint character enrols in a quasi-monastic college
which purveys Hermetic knowledge.

     * A trilogy in which the second volume is (though this is at
present just a guess - I hope that Zindell will surprise me by
avoiding this one) taken up by some long quest in search of a plot
token (in this case a cure for the plague that has killed Danlo's
tribe of Alaloi and threatens to kill other tribes) whose only purpose
is keep the viewpoint character wandering around for enough to prepare
the stage for volume 3.

     Perhaps I'm being overly picky - certainly it is possible to make
use of cliches in new and interesting ways - but I think that these
flaws are evidence of laziness on Zindell's part, evidence that he has
chosen to rest on the laurels of his earlier book rather than pursue
new ideas.

     I had some more fundamental disagreements with "The Broken God".
The plotting is very clumsy and heavy-handed; everything has to have a
significance.  Many of the incidents are carefully contrived so as to
enable some particular event later on (and it seems likely that some
other incidents have been prepared in advence for use in volumes two
and three).  Well done, this kind of tight plotting can be excellent
(for example, in Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun"), but Zindell goes
about it in a very obvious way, often to the extent of putting in
authorly asides about the future significance of what is going on.

     Zindell feels the need to make everything in the book portentous:
Danlo and Hanuman are both extremely intelligent, gifted athletes and
artists, wise, popular and influential.  Their friendship and enmity
are important in the political and religious development of human
civilisation, and it is implied that their every inner thought and
moral dilemma has consequences for the future spiritual and
metaphysical development of the human race.  Zindell seems to think
that his readers won't be interested in normal human relationships,
but I found myself starving for something of the ordinary by the end
of the book.  And again, it is possible to do do the significance trip
well; Orson Scott Card has managed it once or twice (but I suppose
that given the number of times he's attempted it that's not
surprising).

     I also had trouble with the philosophy.  Actually, this isn't all
bad, and Zindell at least tries to do something that I haven't seen
very often before, which is to project the future of
philosophical/scientific thought through at least one major paradigm
shift, so that the characters in his three thousand year future don't
approach the world with the rational and empirical emphasis that most
sf novels take for granted (any more than someone three thousand years
ago would have).  The paradigm shift seems to have been some sort of
scientific holism along the lines expounded by such writers as
Lovelock and Josephson.  It's a courageous attempt, especially when
much of the talk in the novel is about the nature of human
consciousness, but it didn't ring true for me that in three thousand
years no-one has got any further in understanding consciousness than
some form of Penrose-style mysticism in which consciousness arises
from un- or ill-explained fundamental properties of subatomic
particles.  It also didn't ring true that everyone understands the
difference between "gods" (powerful but material entities within the
Universe such as Mallory Ringess, transformed by a remembrance of the
Elder Eddas, or the Solid State entity, a cluster of moon-sized
biocomputers) and "God" (supposed by absent creator of the Universe
and inaccessible to men or gods) but that all the religions in the
books worship the former and not the latter.

     On the whole, I don't think the philosophy works.  It's not
sufficiently alien or strange to be interesting of itself (much of the
book reads like Tantric or Buddhist writing or imitations thereof) and
it isn't relevent enough to me to be compelling; I simply can't
identify at all with the philosophical dilemmas of the characters or
with their sufferings.

     But I shall probably read volume two.  If Zindell could write
something good once, he might be able to try again.

%A Zindell, David 
%T The Broken God
%I HarperCollins
%C New York
%D 1993