What I
like about Zelazny's This Immortal – and I'm wondering if
this is characteristic of his work as a whole (see Lord of Light) –
is that it's about mind games. Below its post-apocalyptic pulp
setting lives
a very clever long con being played on the protagonist. And it's all
the better for not telling you just how many of the supporting
characters are complicit in it.
The plot
is deceptively simple – one of Zelazny's usual Ubermenschen is
detailled to give an alien a tour of a shattered Earth, its real
estate effectively up for the sale to the highest bidder. They are
joined by assorted friends, enemies and frenemies, against a backdrop
of monuments and mutants. It being pulp – there is a lot of
conflict. It being Zelazny – a most conversational author – most
of is verbal.
This
Immortal (which I keep wanting to call My Immortal, after
the notorious Harry Potter fanfic) has its faults. The novel is short
to the point of being brusque in its set-up and execution. Were it
not for the con coming to fruition at the end would feel as if
Zelazny simply tired of the conceit. The superimposition of Greek
mythology onto the mutants feels like a crude dry-run for the greater
sophistication he was to employ in adapting the Hindu pantheon for
Lord of Light. And while pretty good by the standards of the time,
This Immortal still presents a fairly masculinist view of the future
and the people who inhabit it.
But
Zelazny also uses this little puzzle box of a book to nod to
colonialism and anti-colonial resistance, to the complicity of
native culture with the former as well as its underpinning of the
latter. There's a wonderful comic scene covering all these bases in
which the tour party witness the dismantling of the Great Pyramid,
which is ostensibly being done so that the film can be played in
reverse to recreate its construction.
This, I
think, illustrates why it bagged a Hugo back in the late sixties.
This Immortal might be pulp, but it's pulp with depth.
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