The first Sam being Sam Jordison at the Guardian Book Blog, and the second being the hero of the book he is reviewing, Roger Zelazny’s magnificently bonkers Lord of Light. I’m delighted to see that Sam loved it as much as I did when I first read it. Must do so again sometime.
7 thoughts on “Sam on Sam”
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Thanks Cheryl! Glad we feel the same. Indeed, my immdiate reaction when I finished was to want to read it again, just to get a clearer fix on what was going on there… Sadly, other commitments got in the way… but I will reviist it…
Don’t let anything much get in the way of reading Stand on Zanzibar (though I still think that The Sheep Look Up is a better book.
|Oh good news! somone’s said it’s bad over on my blog. Don’t suppose you could put a good word in for it there?
It’s too bad the novel was credited to someone named Robert Zelazny. Check again, please?
I just saw a blog entry in which, as one commenter pointed out before I could see it, the author recommends books by LeGuin [wrong but excusable], Zelanzy [just a typo], and Delaney [aargh!]
As I’m not registered there but I can comment here, I’ll add that I appreciate Sam’s observation that the nature of the gods and their worlds and what’s going on when is confusing to the new reader, and that figuring these out is part of the fun of reading the book. (Though it does raise the issue of spoilers in the review, even though the book is over forty years old.)
But though the chronology is confusing, it’s not so confusing as all that. Of the seven chapters, 1 & 7 are a frame story; the rest is a flashback. That may not be obvious (it wasn’t to me on first reading), but it is straightforward.
And chapter 2 is not there only for the pun about the Shan. This is where Sam the hero first determines that the gods are no longer playing fair with reincarnation for members of the First and are trying to screw him over. After that he declares his active rebellion, moving away from simple apostasy. It’s a critical moment in the plot.
I dunno about what’s with the Christian zombies, though. That mystified me too.
Yeah, who is this “Robert Zelazny” Mr Jordinson is talking about?
The now-famous Argo story is amazing, but completely irrelevant to the novel; it seems a shame that he spends more than half of his review talking about something that has nothing to do with the novel.
It’s kinda like writing a review of Stranger In A Strange Land that spent the first several screens and the conclusion discussing Charles Manson instead of the book or author. As a student of political and intelligence events, the Argo story is fascinating, but as a student of Zelazny, who cares? Either you know about it, or you don’t, but it has nothing whatever to do with understanding or appreciating the book.
And “[t]his intriguing game of bluff would deserve to be remembered even if it hadn’t played such a curiously apt part in the hostage crisis” is truly impressively back-handed praise.
And as DB points out, it’s hardly all that confusing a book unless one has only read it once when one was 12.