From archive (archive)
From: djk@vail.cs.columbia.edu (David Kurlander)
Organization: Columbia University Department of Computer Science
Subject: Davy (A Review)
Date: 29 Nov 88 00:53:21 GMT




There's something about good first person narratives that strikes
a resonant chord with me, particularly narratives in which a
character describes those early events which help form or alter
their world view.  Within SF, some of my favorite books fitting
this classification are Rite of Passage (Alexei Panshin), Riddley
Walker (Russell Hoban), and Shadow of the Torturer (Gene Wolfe).
Motivated by an sf-lovers posting, I tracked down a copy of Davy,
by Edgar Pangborn, a book which also fits in this category.

Davy, which was published back in 1964, pretends to be by a man
in a post-holocaust society who, during a long ocean voyage,
decides to write of his youth.  The world described is
interesting, detailed, and richly presented through the narrator.
Pangborn's characters, with a few significant exceptions, seem
very real and have significant degree of complexity.  Those
exceptions are characters that the narrator meets toward the end
of his youth, who later travel with him on the ship.

One aspect of the book that I found particularly annoying is that
the narrator frequently describes his world in terms of
comparisons with how things were in the Old Time, a time long
before he was born, but conveniently a time with which the reader
is familiar.  Though some motivation for this is presented, it
still feels artificial, as though Pangborn felt he could not
convey his world without explicit comparisons to our own.

However, the book is very well-written, and significantly better
than most of the SF written today.  If you missed this book when
exhausting your library's supply of SF during your own youth, you
might want to track this down.

David Kurlander
djk@vail.columbia.edu