The Bright Phoenix by Harold Mead

...in the State, that brotherhood, all men were brothers and comrades, and all were utterly alone.

Here it is, the eleventh book I will read from the Joachim Boaz wing of the MPorcius Library, Harold Mead's The Bright Phoenix from 1955.  (Check out my blog post on the tenth, Enemy of my Enemy by Avram Davidson, for a list of the first ten and links to my blogposts about them.)  The Bright Phoenix first appeared between hardcovers in Great Britain; the copy Joachim donated to this quixotic endeavor of mine is a 1956 U.S. paperback, Ballantine 147.

The front cover of Ballantine 147 celebrates the discovery of Mead as "an exciting new talent," and the back compares him to highly respected and prolific British SF scribblers John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke.  Alas, poor Harold, isfdb knows him as a guy with only two credits.  Well, I remember when people thought I was going to amount to something, too--now look at me, trapped in a suburban Tartarus, living the dumb show life of a mere wraith, fighting with the landlord over a leak, the source of which his flunkies can't seem to trace, like my apartment is the lower Nile, the heroic towers of Manhattan and my fascinating and piratical life among them a taunting dream.  If it is any consolation, Harold, I slagged John Wyndham's Chrysalids as "thin gruel" and thought Clarke's Imperial Earth had too much romantic slosh about RMS Titanic and the Apollo moon landing.

Well, let's see if the boys in the ad department at Ballantine were on to something in their praise of Mead.  (Check out Joachim Boaz's review of The Bright Phoenix before or after breaking a trail David Livingstone-style through the tangled prose of my own assessment below.)

It is 120 years after a worldwide war demolished civilization.  Our story, related to us in the memoirs of one John Waterville, takes place in the only extant human city, the totalitarian State where government planning of every aspect of your life and total devotion to the government is said to be required to rebuild human civilization.  The government, for example, has veto power over people's sexual relationships, and women with acceptable genes who don't on their own find a man to impregnate them with the required punctuality are conscripted into the baby-producing demographic and impregnated by "State stallions" selected by the government for their above average DNA.  Children are seized from their mothers soon after birth and raised by the government--people in the State never know their parents or their kids.  Commissars called morality officers keep an eye on everybody, enforcing the rules.  Minor criminals and dissenters are "reconditioned," their minds largely erased so they obey all commands and perform menial labor or intricate repetitive operations (like driving a car or barbering) with a maximum of efficiency.  Major criminals are more radically changed in ways known only to the government's sawbones and head shrinkers.

Waterville is a member of the government elite, known as "the officers."  Specifically, he is an explorer, and as his memoir begins he has just returned to rigidly controlled civilization after leading an expedition to "the Island," a wilderness that has grown up around the ruins of the last civilization (our war-smashed civilization, dear reader!)  Despite himself, he finds the stratification and control that characterize life in the State unpleasant, even infuriating--every aspect of this regulated society, so many things he accepted and took for granted before he was sent on the expedition to the Island, now seem terribly wrong, terribly unjust.

One of Mead's primary themes in The Bright Phoenix is the way totalitarian government ruins family life and sexual life, especially how the government promotion of sex divorced from emotional attachment, government separation of women from their children, and the compulsory impregnation of so many women by "stallions," (so that their first sexual experiences are being raped by strangers they can't even see, thanks to a blindfold) damages women psychologically; Mead presents multiple minor women characters who demonstrate this.

While on the Island, Waterville missed women--in theory he could have had sex with one of the conditioned women who served the expedition as porters, but he does not relish sex with a mindless, emotionless zombie, and there are taboos against sex with the Reconditioned.  So, his first day back to the State, he meets a woman--one of the common masses known as "the workers"--at the public cafeteria where she is employed and they go to the local eugenics office and take out a Class A license (you can cohabit for two weeks, but no pregnancy has been authorized!)  By accident, or guided by his subconscious, Waterville has found himself a woman who is also increasingly skeptical of the State and of how it orders everybody's life.

"I oughtn't to have asked you to involve yourself with me.  I'm morally ill, I'm more and more sure of it."

..."Perhaps I'm ill, too," she said, and took my hand.

These two "morally ill" people, Waterville and Jenny, fall in love, but they can only spend two days together because Waterville is sent to the camp where a cadre of pioneers are preparing to move to the Island he so recently explored.  This colony is a pilot project, an experiment, the first step in the state's campaign to repopulate the devastated Earth.

Another theme Mead addresses in The Bright Phoenix is religion.  One of the arguments conservatives will fling at the commies and the hippies and modern Western man in general is that they have replaced worship of God with worship of the government or of man himself, and in this novel the government literally pressures the people into attending church services in which people sing songs to "Human Spirit," AKA "Spirit of Man, the one true guide."  Citizens are told that in their work (all work is assigned by the government) they are serving The Spirit in rebuilding civilization and preventing another cataclysmic war, an ethic which produces a heartless and lonely society:

...in the State people were too busy, too concerned with the Spirit, to let themselves be weakened by other people's cares.  If you are exclusively concerned with the future of man, there is not much place left for individuals.

In the camp Waterville becomes familiar with all the people he will be accompanying on the mission of colonizing the Island.  The effort will be lead by a small number of officers like himself and supported by 200 reconditioned zombie types, but the bulk of pioneers, 500, will be the capital-C Colonists, people specifically bred and trained to repopulate the blasted Earth, the very cream of the State's vigorous eugenics program.  The Colonists are all tall, strong, beautiful blondes with blue eyes.  These marvels of selective breeding are so perfect they disturb Waterville--they seem to lack humanity, and Mead/Waterville compares them to animals:

They moved with the litheness of animals, and like animals they never assumed a posture that was not graceful. 

(I thought this a weird thing to say, that animals are always graceful, but a few pages later Waterville is telling us how much he loves horses, how seeing horses is a delight; is this another example of the stereotypical Englishman's love of animals?)

One of the other officers is also a skeptic, and befriends Waterville.  This dude, Blackler, is the colony's doctor, which is a bit of good fortune, as the doctors of the State have an arsenal of truth drugs that they employ to seek out apostates like Waterville. 

Waterville spends months at the camp, working hard on preparations to launch the colony.  The novel enters horror territory when he gets one day's leave and returns to the city, hoping to spend one last day with Jenny before leaving the State forever for the Island.  He can't seem to find the woman, the love of his life, and then when it is time to go back to the camp he sees a final contingent of the Reconditioned being loaded into the van, and Jenny is among them!

At the head of a company of the zombies, Waterville and a small staff travel to the Island (via helicopter) to spend two months preparing a settlement for the Colonists.  Waterville spends the second month away from the settlement, with a small squad of zombies, scouting other parts of the Island.  These areas turn out to be inhabited by villagers with an organized, if primitive compared to the State, society, one with a more or less stable monarchical politics leavened by a Council of Elders, animal husbandry, wattle and daub houses, etc.  Their culture and religion, in particular their executions of criminals and battles with barbaric raiders from the north, present a marked contrast with that of the State; they are vibrant and individualistic and violent, and Waterville quickly comes to prefer their style of life to the superficially pacific but stultifying collectivism of the State.

...here in this rough community, where a man's hand defended his head, I could bear to live better than among my own people, whose very thoughts were organized against their own frailty; not by themselves, but by a thing outside of them, the State.

But after a month with his new friends (the happiest month in his life, he tells us) he has to return to the settlement to greet the newly arriving Colonists.

As the novel, which is not short (184 pages), has proceeded, from page 45 or so, two major developments have bubbling under the surface that explode in the final quarter or so of the book.  One concerns the Colonists.  Being perfect, the Colonists have contempt for the rest of humanity and some of the officers fear this budding master race is going to murder them and take over the State; once he has met and come to love the people of the Island village, Waterville fears the Colonists will destroy his new low tech friends.

The second evolving development regards the Reconditioned.  An increasing number of these zombie helots show signs of remembering the lives they lead before their "treatment," of their individuality reemerging; even back in the State more and more are going berserk or slacking in their duties, and this "problem" rapidly increases in frequency and severity on the Island.

The blonde giants and the officer who is to head the colony from now on arrive, and Waterville tries to keep the peace, fostering diplomatic relations and trade between the State colony and the village of the Islanders.  But the head officer, Schultz, has become decadent, pursuing power and luxury for himself in defiance of the State's ideology of collectivism and service to the Human Spirit, and the leader of the Colonists is angling for his job, he, like many of the Colonists, resents that a genetic inferior should be in command. 

A big theme of the novel I haven't mentioned much is the idea of violence.  In response to the war that destroyed civilization 120 year ago, the State preaches ceaselessly that violence is wrong, and everybody pretends that reconditioning people and conscripting women to be raped by the stallions isn't really violence.  On the Island, among his new friends, Waterville witnesses out-in-the-open violence in the form of barbarian raids and the punishment of criminals, and when the Reconditioned start slacking and disputes erupt between Colonists and Islanders, all members of the settlement, officers and Colonists, become witnesses to, and many become participants in--some eager participants--in violence.

In a rapid series of developments that I guess are supposed to remind you of the rise of Hitler, there is an apparent Islander or barbarian raid that burns down some of the colony's buildings and kills some people, giving the leader of the Colonists the opportunity to give an emphatic speech, overthrow Schultz, and arm the Colonists and lead an attack on the Islander village.  Westerville and some other officers escape, fighting guards as they do (and finding that violence brings them a thrill and a measure of satisfaction) and the Reconditioned on the Island, including Jenny, recover much of their memories and wills and rise up against the State authorities.  The fighting leads to personal tragedy and to total destruction of the colony, and the author and characters acknowledge the terrible truth of human evil.  But Westerville and many Islanders survive, and the book ends on a mysterious, hopeful note, that I expect is meant to remind readers of the birth of Jesus.

The Bright Phoenix is much better than I had expected it to be.  Competently and professionally written, almost never boring or unclear, with characters and relationships that are all distinct, believable and memorable, interesting topics and themes, and successful little bits of symbolism, the book is a success.  It is to be regretted that Mead has only two credits at isfdb instead of ten or twenty.