Attack on sybarites and/or
whimsical dalliance? (3/5)
In my quest to be a Brunner completist (now at twenty-five novels),
I’ve had to tackle some of Brunner’s lesser known work in the 1980s. This work
occurs after a five-year hiatus of novel writing between Shockwave Rider
(1975) and The
Infinitive of Go (1980). Are these
works lesser known due to an eclipsing presence in the SF community or lesser
known because of deteriorating quality? Therein lays my mission as a Brunner
completist. This is my fourth foray into Brunner’s later work, another addition
to his mediocrity pile.
Rear cover synopsis:
“War hero, jet-setter, gourmet—Godwin Harpinshield was all of
these and more; his life was a game played among the Beautiful People whose
fame, wealth and power set them above the law, and beyond the laws of nature.
Because of a simple bargain that all the Beautiful People made, Godwin’s every
desire was his for the asking. Seduced by luxury, Godwin never doubted his
fortune, never wondered about his mysterious patrons.
Then the game turned ugly.
Suddenly, the ante was raised and the game was real. The stakes
were his future, his sanity and, possibly, his very soul. All Godwin
Harpinshield had to discover was: What were the rules of the game? And who—or
what—were the other players?”
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Godwin
works for an unseen employer, an employer who manipulates his reality as his
reward. His latest task was to recruit a young woman, Gorse, from her life of
prostitution and eventual destitution. To impress her, he lavishes her with
fine drink, fine clothing, and an epic evening of sex but he pities her naïve
youthfulness and mortal concerns; treating her finely yet with detachment,
she’s led into the same mixed reality/fantasy world in which he lives, yet
he’ll more than likely never see her again.
The
rewards for such occasional tasks come in the form of a lavish yet closely
guarded lifestyle: he drives a Lamborghini but parks in a public garage, he
lives in a mansion accessed through a slum, he uses passports only once or
twice, he rejuvenates and detoxes himself as needed; this secretive lifestyle
also allows him to pop in and out of his friend’s bungalow in Bali or a
restaurant in Hawaii.
[H]e
had had ample time to think and reflect and study. He had no need to earn a
living; he was occasionally obliged to invent a new ambition, but that happened
seldom, and one conceived, a single ambition often lasted him for several
years. (189)
One
last reward is his ability to occasionally live out an impossible otherwise
fantasy such as earning a George Medal for heroic efforts during World World
II. The physical reward and relevant newspaper clipping is proof for his pride,
but the emotional/sexual reward from a 10-year-old’s seductive kiss is more
satisfactory, a lingering memory in his mind and on his lips. For successfully
recruiting Grose, he is allowed another reward, a fantasy of his very wish but,
prior to entering the trace-like state, he decides not chose any one scenario,
a choice which sends him on a torturous sequence of punishment, imprisonment,
and sadism. He awakes from his trance stupefied and uncertain, reflecting,
“perhaps it had taken place at some kind of skew-wiff angle between the main
line of reality and the diffuse world of simple fantasy” (119).
The unpleasant affair jilts
Godwin’s waking life, a life which should be filled with riches and luxury yet
has been infiltrated with the memory of pain. Then… he meets an impossible
image from his WWII fantasy—the likeness of the same girl who kissed him is now
following him, suspecting him of something with the police at her side. Rather
than lead a life of suspicion, Godwin plies another of his special traits: the
flex, an ability to manipulate people’s minds. Wiping the memory of his
suspicion from the cops’ memory, Godwin leaves the blonde-haired woman
untouched, yet later confronts her about his own disbelief of her existence.
Shattered by the revelation, Godwin gawps at Barbara, “a handsome woman, a
woman who had had the persistence—the guts, the bloody-mindedness—to struggle
through a miserable life and somehow, nonetheless, create an identity, derived
from nobody but herself and her own dreams” (186).
Gobsmacked perhaps by her simple
human ability to rise from nothing to become a something, Godwin looks inwardly
at himself and what he has achieved:
“Did I create that? Did I earn that? Did I invent or
conceive it or design it?”
And felt the chilling knowledge overtake him:
Of course not. I simply accepted it when it was given.
Who have I been all these years? And, worse yet: What have I
been? (190)
His subjective reality shattered
and his fantasies flattening, Godwin must look through his past to the time
when he accepted his mixed fate, a deal which threatens his life and the life
of another close to him and close to Barbara; it seems their fates are sealed.
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The above quote from page 190
summarizes one of the overarching themes of the book. One possible theme for this
novel could be a shot at rich sybarites who bide their time dabbling in dalliances:
women, cars, parties, restaurants and fantasy. These sybarites spend time and
spend money but actually create nothing for themselves, much like Godwin doesn’t
create his fantasies or even his fate. The novel looks at his coming to realize
that his luxurious lifestyle is tainted with a underlying evil.
I’m torn between liking this
novel and disliking it, so I’m stuck in the middle. The idea that there are
people living on the fringe of our reality who experience their every last
desire is enticing, but there are portions of the book which focus too heavily
on describing the blurred line between Godwin’s fantasies and realities. The
dialogue is a tiresomely echo of outlandish ideas proposed by the characters
with very little actual fact-finding. The reader isn’t grounded to many of the
concepts which Brunner has written into the plot. I guess you could say that
the reader discovers the mysteries of Godwin’s abilities as Godwin himself
discovers the inaccuracies and fallacies of his “work”.
However, I do enjoy the
discovery; my own infantile conceptions of the newly introduced ideas slowly
solidify, an general idea of the direction of Brunner’s young plot. There’s not
too much spelled out for the reader—this where a lot of science fiction gets
tedious, bogged down with data, stats and facts. Brunner keeps the reader engaged,
but the dialogue of discovery—the ping pong postulations—has very little return
and cements nothing. The conclusion doesn’t offer any solid evidence of who
Godwin “works” for; their identity is vague, the reader’s suspicions carrying
its own weight through the conclusion. This is where, at the end, I felt
everything was perhaps too vague.
Brunner isn’t often a poetic
writer, aside from his obvious wealth of poetry, which has been collected in
books such as The Book of John Brunner (1976) and A Hastily Thrown Together Bit of Zork (1974). But many of his novels are written
straight-forwardly, attention invested in the originality of the plot (or
sometimes on the dollar return from an easy sell) or probing a subject to a
great degree (or stumbling over himself in the process). Brunner is also an
author who indulges in a few pet topics: spies, hypnotism and telepathy; in
this regard, he can be an indulgent author but only to the point of favoring
pet topics… he isn’t one to drop cutesy references, go off on a political
tangent or fixate on sex.
Saying that, Players at the
Games of People feels like an oddly indulgent novel by Brunner, a novel in
which he flows poetically at times but also fixates on a specific type of
sexual relations (mainly, direct clitoral stimulation); compare: “[H]e fretted
ceaselessly as though he were an oyster doubtful about the advantages of being
parent to a pearl” (144) and ”He recalled her capacity for orgasm. It has been
impressive” (135).
One last oddity, merely a
curiosity, about Players at the Games of People is its format. The
219-page novel is divided into 39 unnumbered chapters, nineteen of those pages
blank due to pagination (the separation between the end of a chapter and the
next so that each chapter begins on the same side—all on odd pages of all of
even pages). This results in a choppy read as the chapters are rarely
continuous. Aside from Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and The Sheep Look Up
(1972), all my other Brunner novels have numbered chapters.
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Players
at the Games of People is a Brunner curiosity. I don’t see it
having much importance in his bibliography, but it does offer the Brunner fan a
chance to follow his lead, look into his mind, and chase his indulgences.
Interesting… but not essential to anyone other than the Brunner completist,
like myself.
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