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A review by ravenbait
The Deceivers by Alfred Bester
3.0
I'm adding a preface to my original review, because I re-read this book after seeing other reviews -- it had been many years since I read it when I first reviewed it. The price on the back was £2.95, which should tell you something.
I still love Bester, and I love his work, and I will be forever grateful to him for doing things with his prose that resonated so strongly with me as I tried to reconcile the things my synaesthetic senses told me about the world around me with the way other people described the world around them; worlds, that, by description alone, were not remotely the same.
But reading this book again, now, this far into the 21st century, it's painfully full of racist stereotypes, insensitivity, misappropriation and sexism. The jaunty lingo I remembered as being not dissimilar to that in the Charteris Saint books isn't quite so jocular and evocative. There are a lot of failings in this book, and it isn't Bester at his most innovative or creative. It reads more like it was written by someone who found himself stranded in a rapidly-evolving cultural and political landscape, and who was trying, unsuccessfully, to catch up.
I don't read the uncomfortable caricatures as malicious, or even an attempt to cling to the comfortable and familiar; more as an attempt to navigate a changed world with tools carried from the old one. It made me sad rather than angry, and I can understand why other people rate it so poorly.
This is my original review:
I think, if I were to be asked which book made me want to write, and I hadn't already been writing, this would be the one.
Bester's facility with using physical patterns of prose to convey sensory anomalies is an absolute delight in this, a book about a pattern matcher searching for his pregnant, shapeshifting alien partner across a galaxy of planets. I'm synaesthetic: the idea that one can depict atypical sensory impressions using the words themselves was a revelation to me. It turns up again in "The Stars My Destination", but is at its best and most creative in this book.
I love Bester's work, love the glorious mash-up of Sixties slang and genre-bending plots. This starts with the protagonist being led on a deliberate trail using the Twelve Days of Christmas and continues, preposterously, fabulously, from there. It's brilliant and, to my mind, sadly underrated.
I still love Bester, and I love his work, and I will be forever grateful to him for doing things with his prose that resonated so strongly with me as I tried to reconcile the things my synaesthetic senses told me about the world around me with the way other people described the world around them; worlds, that, by description alone, were not remotely the same.
But reading this book again, now, this far into the 21st century, it's painfully full of racist stereotypes, insensitivity, misappropriation and sexism. The jaunty lingo I remembered as being not dissimilar to that in the Charteris Saint books isn't quite so jocular and evocative. There are a lot of failings in this book, and it isn't Bester at his most innovative or creative. It reads more like it was written by someone who found himself stranded in a rapidly-evolving cultural and political landscape, and who was trying, unsuccessfully, to catch up.
I don't read the uncomfortable caricatures as malicious, or even an attempt to cling to the comfortable and familiar; more as an attempt to navigate a changed world with tools carried from the old one. It made me sad rather than angry, and I can understand why other people rate it so poorly.
This is my original review:
I think, if I were to be asked which book made me want to write, and I hadn't already been writing, this would be the one.
Bester's facility with using physical patterns of prose to convey sensory anomalies is an absolute delight in this, a book about a pattern matcher searching for his pregnant, shapeshifting alien partner across a galaxy of planets. I'm synaesthetic: the idea that one can depict atypical sensory impressions using the words themselves was a revelation to me. It turns up again in "The Stars My Destination", but is at its best and most creative in this book.
I love Bester's work, love the glorious mash-up of Sixties slang and genre-bending plots. This starts with the protagonist being led on a deliberate trail using the Twelve Days of Christmas and continues, preposterously, fabulously, from there. It's brilliant and, to my mind, sadly underrated.