From archive (archive)
Subject: QUEST FOR APOLLO by Michael Lahey
From: ecl@cbnewsj.ATT.COM (Evelyn C. Leeper)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Date: 11 Mar 90 14:37:34 GMT




		      QUEST FOR APOLLO by Michael Lahey
		    DAW, 1989, ISBN 0-88677-364-4, $3.95.
		      A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
		       Copyright 1990 Evelyn C. Leeper

     Dante's INFERNO has fascinated fantasy authors.  Larry Niven and Jerry
Pournelle did a science fictional version of it, Salman Rushdie based his
first novel on a variation of it, and now Michael Lahey takes a different
approach to the meeting of Dante and Virgil.  Unfortunately, Lahey hasn't
managed to deliver either as interesting a world as Niven or Pournelle or as
introspective a book as Rushdie.

     In QUEST FOR APOLLO we find that Virgil has been meeting poets with the
initials "D. A." ever since he died.  Now he meets the main character,
Delbert Alderini, but this time is different.  They are told by the goddess
Diana that Apollo has been put under a curse, which causes him to be reborn
as mortal over and over, dying a tragic death each time.  They are given six
nights to go back in time (through their dreams), find Apollo, and make him
aware of his divine nature.  If they fail, the world will be destroyed.  So
the first night they go back and find Apollo in ancient Rome, but just as
they are about to make him aware of his identity, circumstances prevent
them, and they wake up.

     So as you the reader sit there, about one-quarter through the book, how
difficult is it to figure out what the rest of the book will be like?  Or,
for that matter, how it will end?

     Lahey has a talent for writing comedy that does show through, but the
book is a disappointment in that it seems to be aiming for a much higher
level than just light reading.  In particular, the scenes of battlefield
hospitals and Nazi concentration camps seem out of place in a book intended
only as humor, and lead me to believe that Lahey was trying for more, but
couldn't quite reach it.  "[La] diritta via era smarrita," or in other
words, he has lost the straight path to his goal.

Evelyn C. Leeper   |   +1 201-957-2070   |   att!mtgzy!ecl or ecl@mtgzy.att.com