Mid '60s stories from Edgar Pangborn, Algis Budrys & Philip Latham

Let's take a look at Terry Carr's 1970 anthology On Our Way to the Future, Ace 62940.  The little bio at the start of the book tells us Carr lived in Brooklyn with his wife Carol, also a writer in and out of the SF field, and reminds us of his collaborative work with Donald Wollheim.  Oh yeah, and that he and Carol had two cats, Gilgamesh and George.  Meow!

We've already read the story by Kris Neville in On Our Way to the Future, as well as James Schmitz's contribution, "Goblin Night;" today let's look at the included pieces by Edgar Pangborn, Algis Budrys and Philip Latham (the pen name of professional astronomer Robert S. Richardson.)

"A Better Mousehole" by Edgar Pangborn (1965)

No doubt you remember when we read Pangborn's novels Davy and West of the Sun. Let's see what he does in a shorter format.

"A Better Mousehole," which first appeared in a special issue of Fred Pohl's Galaxy, is written in the voice of the uneducated bartender of a little hick town.  He speaks in a kind of redneck dialect ("The back room gets lively Saturday nights, and I ain't been sweeping up too good, last couple-three weeks"), saying "desecrator" for "decorator" and "thermostack" for "thermostat" and misattributing cliches to the Bible and that sort of thing.  Through the medium of his garbled text we learn all about the various wacky characters in this little town and their strained relationships with each other.  We also learn the plot of the story, somewhat obliquely.  One of the town's inhabitants is a wealthy intellectual who will leave his decaying mansion for months at a time to explore unpopulated corners of the world.  From his most recent trip he brought back to the little town a basketball-sized blue sphere which turns out to be the vehicle of tiny alien invaders!

These aliens, whom our narrator calls "blue bugs," are sort of interesting.  Those they bite have wonderful dreams; being bitten also seems to improve a  victim's mood.  It is hinted that the "bugs" might be able to make the world a better place by rendering people more mellow... but there are also clues that suggest being bitten drives some to insanity, murder, even death.  I compared Pangborn's novels to the work of Theodore Sturgeon, and the possibility that alien invaders might improve human society, as well as references to love and sex in "A Better Mousehole," also brought Sturgeon to mind.  [UPDATE 12/6/2016: In the comments ukjarry sheds light on the Sturgeon-Pangborn connection!]

The plot of "A Better Mousehole" is basically straightforward traditional SF stuff, but Pangborn gussies the story up by having it told via an idiosyncratic and unreliable narrator and by not telling the story in strict chronological order.  I found it entertaining.

"Be Merry" by Algis Budrys (1966)

When it first appeared in If, "Be Merry" was billed as a "complete novel" and it takes up like 50 pages of On Our Way to the Future.

This is one of those post-apocalyptic jobs, but has elements of hope as well as descriptions of ruins and sickly people and depictions of the ruthlessness of people who have been pushed to extremes.  And it takes place in my home state of New Jersey, with a description of a typical Jersey Shore town and references to Route 46, with which I am very familiar, and WOR, one of the radio stations I listened to during my four years of driving between home and Rutgers and then three years driving between home and the kind of job my RU history degree had prepared me for, earning minimum wage at a bookstore.

The background: Space alien lifeboats crash landed on Earth in the 1960s; the aliens were friendly, but carried diseases that killed most of mankind.  The aliens themselves were in turn made ill by Earth germs.  Human society collapsed, but the survivors have been slowly rebuilding a tolerant multi-species society.

The plot: Evidence reaches a center of the fledgling new society that there is a New Jersey town which is surprisingly healthy (of all the outposts of survivors, it is the only one which isn't always requesting drugs and medical supplies.)  Our narrator, a human, and his partner, an alien, are sent to investigate this mysterious town.  What they find could lead to their deaths, or the kind of paradigm shift we often see in classic SF stories, the solution to the problems plaguing the new civilization!

I have been very hard on Algis Budrys' famous novel Rogue Moon, but I liked his novel Man of Earth and I also like "Be Merry."  The writing style is good, there are engaging ideas, and all of the numerous characters play a role in the plot and feel "real:" they are interesting, have believable motivations and act in a logical manner, and the reader can identify with them; none are incredibly virtuous or cartoonishly evil.  Budrys actually had me wondering how the story was going to turn out, and actually caring how it turned out.  

Quite good.

"Under the Dragon's Tail" by Philip Latham (1966)

This is a humor story about an astronomer who is an arrogant jerk.  He works at a county planetarium near Los Angeles and is sick and tired of having to be nice to the taxpayers who pay his salary and having to listen to all the dolts and cranks who call him and write him with their dumb questions and crazy theories.  Most of the story's fifteen pages is this kind of comedy material.  When he is not complaining or running the projector, the astronomer finds time to do lots of calculations about an asteroid.  His calculations indicate that the asteroid is going to strike Los Angeles and cause "more devastation" than would a strike by "many thermonuclear weapons."  Instead of getting upset and calling Washington or other scientists for confirmation of this terrible news, he treasures the discovery to himself!  He's gone mad!

"Under the Dragon's Tail," first published in Analog, is not bad.  I guess it is sort of funny, and the author includes classical references, Shakespeare references, and plenty of stuff about astronomy and the operation of a planetarium, so it keeps the reader's interest, while the question of whether we should identify with the protagonist or deplore him provides a little ambiguity and tension.

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These three stories were all worth my time; Carr made decent selections here.  There are several more stories in On Our Way to the Future by writers I care about, so it is very likely we will return to it in the future.

West of the Sun by Edgar Pangborn

"You're proposing," Dorothy said, "to take a chance on love?"

Wright was tranquil, watching the meadow.  "Whenever men put their chips on the other thing they always lost, didn't they?"

One of the few of my 386 SF paperbacks that is not currently packed up in a cardboard box is my Dell edition (#9442) of Edgar Pangborn's West of the Sun, a novel that first appeared in 1953.  My copy was printed in 1966; I purchased it at Second Story Books in Washington D.C., a cool place to buy old prints (I got a Kenyon Cox print) and tribal masks (these are outside the MPorcius budget) as well as 50 cent paperbacks of obscure SF novels.

I was afraid to guess what the blue thing was... could it be a plesiosaur fin?  Is that you, Nessie?

The collage on the cover by Hoot von Zitzewitz is pretty insane; from left to right we've got an orangutan with a (I guess) spear that our man Hoot helpfully drew in, some kind of sea anemone, young lovers running on the beach (we all remember that scene with Elke Sommer in 1962's Douce Violence don't we?) a tree (on fire?) and a hand drawing a bow.  Are these images emblematic of what takes place in West of the Sun?  Sounds like readers can look forward to the sex and violence we all crave in our genre literature.  Looking through Hoot's body of work via google, I was a little surprised to see that Dell used the same cover on its British edition of critical darling Judith Merril's ninth Annual of the Year's Best S-F anthology.  Maybe there was hope that the orangutan would join the rocket and the robot as iconic SF images suitable for any SF paperback's cover.

Internet SF gadfly Joachim Boaz told me (via twitter and in a comment on my post about Pangborn's Davy) that West of the Sun was so weak that he couldn't finish it, but I had just read Nicholas Thomas's book on James Cook's voyages so I was all revved up to explore new territory, no matter how forbidding!

Our cast of characters, and
Second Story's 50 cent stamp

The year is 2056.  The Earth is divided into two unhappy camps, a technocratic and technophilic socialist West ("the Federation") and a despotic East ("Jenga's empire.")  Human freedom has taken a hit, but the Federation has made major technological advances, and as the novel opens the multi-ethnic crew of the Federation's first star ship is about to land on Lucifer, a "red-green" planet named for the "son of the morning."  We get a serving of one of the novel's themes (the potential for all people, and all things, to do both good and evil) right there on the third page of text, when the mission's intellectual leader, Doc Wright, tells his comrades, "Lucifer was an angel....Devils and angels have a way of turning out to be the same organism."

Due to a fault in the construction of the star ship (perhaps an indication that the technology-obsessed Federation isn't even good at what it professes to be its primary focus) the six astronauts who lived to see Lucifer are shipwrecked on the red-green planet.  They quickly meet and befriend a member of an over-sized hairy race of territorial individualists; this character is depicted in all his glory, battling a serpentine reptile, on the Italian edition of the novel, and, I suppose, is represented by our man Hoot with that stock image of an orangutan.  Soon after, contact is made with a society of war-like Stone Age (Pangborn uses the word "Neolithic") pygmy villagers. As Harry Harrison would do with the reptile people in his Eden series in the 1980s, Pangborn flips gender roles with these belligerent shorties; among them the females are big and strong and form the ruling and military class, while the small and weak males are sensitive and raise the kids and form a parasitic priestly class.

The second of the book's three sections takes place a year after the arrival of the humans.  Doc Wright and his crew have tried to convince the queen of the pygmies to stop enslaving people and breeding them for the dinner table, but the pygmies are reluctant to change their ways, and, besides, are busy with a war against another, much larger, empire of pygmies.  Much of this second part of the book is taken up with a blow by blow account of the climactic battle of this war between pygmy empires; the humans with their firearms and a cadre of the hairy giants lead the smaller group of pygmies in battle.  The tone of the war chapters is tragic--the human led side is defeated, and we get lots of scenes of minor characters dying, Iliad-style.

The novel's final section takes place ten years after the Earthlings' landing. The handful of humans, giants and pygmies who survived the war have founded a peaceful city on an island. The pygmies have given up cannibalism, slavery, religion, and their antipathy to the giants.  While Doc Wright was building a libertarian utopia, Ed Spearman, the human most closely associated with the socialists back on Earth, struck out on his own to make himself ruler of yet another empire of pygmy villagers.  (One of Doc Wright's catchphrases is "No one is expendable," which reminded me of Ayn Rand's exhortations that every man "is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others"--Spearman's oft-repeated catchphrase is "you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs," a cliche associated with Stalinism and warfare.)  When Doc Wright and friends meet Spearman for the first time in years he is a paranoid dictator of a crumbling city.

Minutes after the meeting with Spearman, in one of those coincidences books are filled with, Earth's second star ship lands nearby.  The four members of this ship's crew are individualist small-government types, like Doc, so when everybody is sitting around drinking wine and talking about how Marx and Lenin suck, Spearman steals the new ship and flies off.  The last dozen pages of the novel are a transcription of a conversation in which Doc and his buddies describe the philosophy and practice of the utopia they have built on Lucifer.
     
When I talked about Davy, Pangborn's celebrated 1964 novel, I suggested it had a lot in common with the works of big name SF writers Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, and the same can be said for West of the Sun.  Like in so many Heinlein stories we get a strong dose of individualism (the likable Earth characters are dismissive of socialism, democracy, collectivism, and the state in general) as well as a discussions of the nature of freedom.  As in both Heinlein's and Sturgeon's work there is a hostility to religion, conspicuous anti-racism, and a stress on the importance of love (e. g., Doc Wright preaches to the natives that "we are all one flesh").

We even get scenes of nudism, another Heinlein/Sturgeon interest, one of those relationships in which an adult man marries a woman he knew as a prepubescent girl (like in Heinlein's Time for the Stars and Door into Summer), and group marriages.  The character of Dorothy, a young black woman, embodies much of the novel's ideology.  She was assigned to the mission as a little girl, straight from the government orphanage (it took eleven years to get to Lucifer.)  (I don't know why the government would use up any of the seven crew slots on its first interstellar mission on somebody with no college degree and no work experience, but there it is.)  Once on Lucifer she takes the lead in diplomatic relations with the pygmies, stripping off her top to demonstrate she has no weapons, and so the leaders of the matriarchal natives (who have four boobs) will be able to tell she is a fellow woman (though two boobs short.)  Dorothy married Paul Mason during the space trip, but when Wright looks to him to see if he approves of sending his wife on this perilous diplomatic mission, Dorothy strikes a blow for individualism and feminism, insisting that whether she will take this risk is her decision to make.  Later in the novel Dorothy bears not only Paul's children but another man's.

I mentioned above that I just read 400 pages about Captain Cook's three voyages to the Pacific in the 1760s and 1770s, and things in West of the Sun kept reminding me of stuff that happened to Cook and his compatriots.  The pygmies, for example, share attributes with some of the various Pacific and South American people Cook encountered: they practice cannibalism, wear tattoos and a smelly oil, worship giant idols, and their culture is characterized by tension between a priestly class and a warrior class.  Maybe Pangborn was influenced by accounts of Cook's explorations?

Click and squint to read Kim Stanley
Robinson's fulsome praise of Pangborn

West of the Sun also brought to mind Virgil and Horace.  Like those Latin poets and their readers, the human characters in the novel are preoccupied with memories of a recent civil war back on Earth.  Like the Trojans in the Aeneid, the humans and the pygmies in the novel flee trouble at home to found a new and better civilization.

I found West of the Sun interesting because of all these connections I was able to detect (or concoct) to other books I've read, and I am sympathetic to its ideology, but is it entertaining?  When it comes to style and pacing, it is just pedestrian, and the characters are not particularly well drawn or memorable. One of my issues with the novel is that there are very many characters, too many to really keep track of: eleven humans, ten or so pygmies, a bunch of giants, and a bunch of riding animals that are given precious names like "Miss Ponsonby" and "Susie."  (My apologies to all the Ponsonbies and Susies in the audience--your name is just too adorable!)  Another of my gripes is how the most interesting human characters, Dorothy and Spearman, disappear from the narrative for long stretches.  Paul is the main character for long periods, and he is just not compelling.

In the end, I have to give West of the Sun my overused "acceptable" rating.  Not bad, but not thrilling or special.  I can't decide whether I like it more or less than Davy... Davy has a better style and is more ambitious, but I think West of the Sun is better structured and more even.

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My copy of West of the Sun has five pages of ads in the back.  None are for SF books, though some are for books that would perhaps be of interest to the SF community, like Arthur C. Clarke's novel about World War II flight technology, a pile of anthologies with Alfred Hitchcock's name on them, and the source material for one of the iconic manly man's films.

The Ice in the Bedroom by P. G. Wodehouse

"To oblige his uncle Lord Blicester, I took him into my employment and he arrives in the morning and leaves in the evening, but apart from a certain rudimentary skill in watching the clock, probably instinctive, I would describe him as essentially a lily of the field."

My copy, veteran of innumerable readings

The doughty souls who read this here blog regularly are well aware that I recently read Edgar Pangborn's Davy, a novel which was supposed to be funny but which did not quite reach the mark.  To make sure I hadn't lost my sense of humor in some head injury my wife has tactfully neglected to mention, I next read my withdrawn library copy of P. G. Wodehouse's 1961 novel The Ice in the Bedroom.  You'll be relieved to hear it inspired quite a few smiles and laughs, proving my funny bone still functional.

I acquired the volume pictured to the left at an epic sale at the Central Branch of the Des Moines Public Library; this sale has been one of the high points of my tour of duty out here in the Middle West.  A hardcover from Simon and Schuster which says "FIRST PRINTING" on the publication page, my copy of The Ice in the Bedroom was apparently one of the Des Moines Library's star attractions for several decades, and is in quite rough shape; most pages bear one or more unidentifiable stains, many are held together with tape, and several made a break for freedom while I was reading them.  Luckily I am in the midst of packing for a move and have lots of tape of my own at hand with which to give the book a new lease on life.

The Ice in the Bedroom's 246 pages are full of intertwining plots, wacky coincidences, sharply drawn characters, and references both subtle and overt to high literature.  I sometimes find Wodehouse's plots convoluted to the point that I can't really follow them, and thus regard them as little more than a dimly-seen skeleton upon which the meat of his writing, the amusing dialogue, is hung, but I was able to master the plot of The Ice in the Bedroom without undue effort.

Unlike most of the famous Jeeves and Wooster stories, which are first person narratives, The Ice in the Bedroom is told in the omniscient third person.  Our hero is Frederick Fotheringay Widgeon, nephew of Lord Blicester and resident of the London suburb of Valley Fields, but there are like a dozen other characters, and we spend as much time with each of them as with "Freddie," and witness the workings of all of their (to varying degrees, eccentric or deranged) psyches.  Foremost among these are beautiful young blonde Dolly Molloy, shoplifter and jewel thief, and her husband, con man and brute Thomas, American crooks come to London to prey upon the English middle and upper classes; and forty-something novelist Bessie Binns, who writes under the name Leila Yorke.  Yorke is probably my favorite figure in this drama.  She has grown rich writing best-selling sentimental novels of love which almost all of The Ice in the Bedroom's characters, including Yorke herself, consider "slush" or "bilge." Yorke aspires to write something dark and serious, a grim work of literary merit:

"But can you?"

"Can I what?"

"Write an important novel?" 

"Of course I can.  All you have to do is cut out the plot and shove in plenty of misery."

Dolly Molloy with the title ice,
disguised as a maid 

Freddie is in love with Sally Foster, Yorke's assistant, but Sally is angry at him and has declared she wishes to never see him again.  To bring Sally back into a state of propinquity, Freddie convinces Yorke to rent the recently vacated house next door to him in Valley Fields, which is known as Castlewood.  He tells the novelist, quite fallaciously, that Valley Fields is a grey depressed area, where she will be able to soak up lots of atmosphere for her novel about the oppressed proletariat.  Who recently vacated the palatial estate of Castlewood?  The Molloys of Chicago--Thomas ceased renting the property while Dolly was doing a brief stint in Holloway gaol.  When Dolly gets out of gaol she reveals to Thomas that she hid some jewels she stole from Myrtle Prosser, wife of Freddie's friend Alexander Prosser, in the bedroom of Castlewood, so Thomas and Dolly devise and execute many abortive plans to sneak into Castlewood and recover the hot ice. This is no easy task, as Yorke is as handy with a shotgun as a pen and Freddie's cousin and roommate George is an officer of the law.

The other characters, like Mr. Shoesmith, Alexander's father-in-law and Freddie's boss (it is his assessment of Freddie that I chose as the epigraph to this blog post) all have their own narrative arcs which interact with Freddie's and the principal characters'; these include Sally's suspicions that Freddie is chasing Dolly, Yorke's hiring a crooked private eye to search for her estranged husband, and the fallout from Freddie blowing all his savings on shares in a valueless oil field in Arkansas, sold to him by Thomas Molloy.

All the varied plots have happy endings. In particular, the reader is relieved that Yorke, displaying the sympathy for the consumer we expect from creative types, even abandons her scheme to write a "significant" literary work and goes back to giving the people what they want:

"There rose before me the vision of all those thousands of half-witted women waiting with their tongues out for their next ration of predigested pap from my pen, and I felt it would be cruel to disappoint them.....And there was another aspect of the matter.  Inasmuch as these blighted novels of squalor have to be at least six hundred pages long, hammering one out would have been the most ghastly sweat...."

Sally discovers Freddie applying
iodine to Dolly's skinned knee 

I found The Ice in the Bedroom lots of fun; the characters and storylines are all funny, but, as usual, the real joy of Wodehouse is his writing style, turns of phrase, and all the cultural references; in this one we get a surfeit of allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, George Gissing, and the literary life.  Thanks to Wodehouse fans more learned and industrious than your humble blogger, who have compiled footnotes to The Ice in the Bedroom's allusions and quotations here, none of the cultural references need escape the reader's comprehension.

Everybody and his brother, from Jack Vance and Jonathan Ames to George Will and Christopher Hitchens, is always falling all over themselves trying to tell you how great Wodehouse is, and on this topic I am happy to be part of the crowd.  The Ice in the Bedroom is a worthwhile diversion, a charming and pleasant bit of fun I don't hesitate to recommend.  I purchased a stack of Wodehouse hardcovers at that Des Moines Public Library book sale, and don't regret spending a single one of those pennies.    

Davy by Edgar Pangborn

No doubt religion had to be invented for such gentle and simple minds, and perhaps they can't get along without it any more than I can get along with it.

Squint or click to check out the Foster illo or the gushing blurbs

I'd never read anything by Edgar Pangborn, and in fact knew nothing about him, so, curious, I recently picked up a few of his novels in Omaha, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C.  First up, Davy.

Published in 1964, Davy appears to have been well-received by the press, who declared it ribald, spicy, racy, terrifying, and intelligent; by major science-fiction writers like Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon; and by some guy I never heard of, Clark Kinnaird, apparently a newspaper columnist.  The blurbs on my Ballantine paperback (U6018) hint that the book is full of jokes and sex.  Well, like everybody (except maybe Philip Stanhope, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield), I like to laugh and I like to have sex, so maybe I'll enjoy Davy as much as did Messrs. Heinlein, Sturgeon and Kinnaird.  Let's hope so!

Davy is another one of those post-apocalyptic stories; we readers of science fiction run into a lot of these. This one is laced with satire (like Spawn of the Death Machine), famous places are known by corrupted names (like in "Magic City"), its characters have been reduced to a pre-industrial lifestyle and everybody is worried about mutants, thanks largely to an oppressive religion that is harshing everybody's buzz (like in Re-Birth.)  In Davy (as in the three works I just mentioned) the apocalypse took place over a hundred years ago, unlike in False Dawn or No Blade of Grass, in which the characters are trying to survive in the period immediately after the collapse of 20th-century society.  Davy's world is the result of a 20th-century nuclear war followed by plagues; somehow the sea levels also rose.  (When it rains it pours, I guess.)

I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I'm a little tired of all this post-apocalyptic business, but when I'm at the art museum I don't say "cripes, another statue of a naked person from those Greeks and Romans" or "oh, big surprise, a roomful of pictures of the Virgin Mary from those Medieval and Renaissance painters"--I recognize the intrinsic interest of these subjects, and try to judge each work on its individual merit.  I'll try to do the same for Davy.

This cover strongly conveys
the tone and content of the novel

The text of Davy is a memoir written by 28-year-old Davy as he and comrades sail the Atlantic and then found a settlement on an island in the Azores--they are fleeing defeat in a war in the American Northeast.  The narrative is not strictly linear; Davy intersperses the story of his youth (the bulk of the narrative) with references to his current adventures as well as the recent history of Nuin, a large city ruled by Davy and his buddies for a few years.  They tried to institute reforms and triggered a religious uprising which threw them out of power.  Davy's aristocratic wife Nickie and friend Dion, former monarch of Nuin, are proofreading his manuscript as he writes it, and add asides and clarifications in the form of footnotes.

Most of the 260-page novel takes place in upstate New York and New England, where Pangborn spent his college years and writing career.  The area is split up into many small countries that don't really get along, but all recognize the same church, the Holy Murcan Church, which tries to limit the excesses of wars and maintain some kind of social order by such policies as regulating 20th-century artifacts (gunpowder is outlawed), forbidding ocean exploration, and demanding the death of all mutants.  I guess this is supposed to remind you of the international political structure of medieval Europe.  People live in walled towns because of bandits and aggressive mutant predators, like fifteen-foot-long great cats.  Davy, born in a brothel to parents he doesn't know, spends his early childhood in an orphanage. As a teen he is a bond servant in the town of Skoar in the country of Moha.  He runs away the same week a war breaks out between Moha and Katskils; before he escapes he makes sure to have sex with his boss's beautiful daughter Ennia.

On the road to Conicut and Vairmont Davy hooks up with deserters from the Katskils army.  After some adventures with them he joins a musical troupe/band of snake oil salesmen and travels around, playing a French horn he stole from a mutant he befriended early in the book.  Finally he gets involved in the politics of the big city of Nuin (I think this is Boston), marries Nickie, a beautiful aristocratic woman, and befriends Dion, the enlightened ruler. 

I love this exciting cover, but it does
 nothing to communicate the feel of  the book 

Due to the Heinlein and Sturgeon blurbs on the back I sort of read Davy with those revered elders of the SF community in mind, and much of the book did remind me of Heinlein.  The plot is kind of like those Heinlein tales in which a young man leaves home, is taken under the wing of mentors, learns more about the world and grows up.  One example would be Universe, in which the protagonist befriends mutants early in the story and later learns that the "world" he is living in (despite what the priestly class has been telling him) is in fact a spaceship, with a much vaster world beyond that he undertakes to explore.  Similarly, Davy befriends a mutant early in Davy and later learns that the world is not the small square the church says, but in fact a far larger sphere, which he yearns to circumnavigate. Another would be Starman Jones; in that novel the hero is a young boy who is mentored by hobo Sam Anderson, a deserter from the military; Davy is mentored by Sam Loomis, a "loner" who is also a military deserter.  There are also parallels between Citizen of the Galaxy and Davy; in both a young person living in servitude escapes and goes on to become a leader in the fight against slavery.

Pangborn seems to share Heinlein's individualistic attitude; Davy denounces communism, calling it a "spooky religion," Christianity's younger brother.  On the same page Davy reminds us that "only individuals think," and later one of the book's mentor figures says that "loners" may be the only people who sincerely like people.  (I guess this is one of those Oscar Wilde-style paradoxes.)  The whole book romanticizes "loners" and free-thinkers, and, not surprisingly, Davy was a preliminary nominee for a Prometheus Award in 1989.

Heinlein and Sturgeon, in their writing, celebrate sex, and express a deep skepticism of religion and traditional mores in general.  (Need I remind you of Sturgeon's story about incest?)  Davy shares these themes.  Many pages are devoted to demonstrating or just plain telling you that religion is not only a scam that gives comfort to the foolish and ignorant, but can hold back society and make the lives of individuals worse.  Memorable examples include a character who forgoes the joys of sexual intercourse because of his religion, and a scene in which people get killed by one of those huge felines because their religious convictions prevent them from dealing rationally with the mutant cat.

The colony in the Azores (dubbed Neonarcheos) is reminiscent of the utopias we see in Sturgeon's work and the settlements and new nations we often see in Heinlein's work.  Neonarcheos has unconventional sexual practices: there is a group marriage (a family of two men and one woman), while Dion sexually desires Nickie (his cousin), who is 15 years his junior and whom he knew when she was a baby (this kind of thing happens in Heinlein's Door into Summer and Time for the Stars.)  The women of Neonarcheos run around topless, and what could be more utopian than that?
    

Ecstatic blurbs from the first page
of my copy of  Davy

I'm seeing Davy as primarily an attack on religion, but as I suggested above, Davy's blurbs sell it as a book that is fun because it is full of jokes and sex.  So, how are the jokes?  And how are the sex scenes?

I don't think I actually laughed at the jokes, but some are OK.  Many are reflections of how our world (the "Old-Time") bewilders the people of the future.  One of Davy's fellows describes at length a retractable ball point pen; nobody in Davy's world can figure out what it is.  Davy finds the iconic personages and classic literature of our civilization confusing: "St. George and his everloving cherry tree, or poor Julius Caesar dividing his gall in three parts so as not to offend his friends, Romans countrymen...." 

There is also low humor, like jokes about farts, and there is a slapsticky set piece in which a teen-aged Davy, interrupted while stealing clothes, is hiding behind a door during a seance.  He puts on a fat woman's voluminous white dress and bursts into the dimly-lit ceremony, scaring the seance participants who think he is a ghost.  In the same way that Davy thinks a fat woman's huge breasts are funny, he also thinks a skinny woman's flat chest is funny, and finds it amusing that the flat-chested skinny woman runs naked out of the house where the seance is being held and into the center of the town where everybody can see her.  Davy is full of jokes that feel like jokes you've been hearing all your life.          

A lot of these jokes are probably not going to receive the feminist seal of approval (thgere's even a mother-in-law joke), and I think the sex scenes may be in the same boat.  Davy loses his virginity to Ennia on page 84 in a "no means yes" scene which nowadays may raise eyebrows as efficiently as it quickens heartbeats: 

And she whimpered: "Ah no!"--in a way that couldn't mean anything except: "What the devil would be stopping you?"--and twisted her loins away from me, only to remind me I must use a little strength in this game.

Davy's second sexual partner (page 135) also likes to wrestle as foreplay:

"...come take me.  You'll have to work for it...."  I worked for it, wrestling her at first with all my strength and getting no breaks at all until until the struggle had warmed her up into real enjoyment.  Then all of a sudden she was kissing and fondling instead of fighting me off....

Pangborn doesn't use phrases like "rough sex" or "playacting rape," but it certainly seems like that is what is going on.

These sex scenes are probably the best scenes in the book--they inspire some kind of feeling and thought in the reader.  In contrast, the action scenes are boring, and all the anti-clericalism, and many of the jokes, are banal.  There is also way too much travelogue in the book, descriptions of towns and their history that seem pointless.

As a whole, Davy is just OK... at times it felt quite boring.  I sympathize with its attitude about sex and religion, but the pace is slow and the novel feels long, and, as I have said, many scenes and ideas feel tired, like I've read or seen them before.  (How many movies and TV shows have included a scene with a snakeoil salesman?)  I didn't find the characters interesting, and I didn't care what happened to them and I wasn't very curious about what would happen next or how the story would turn out (we know how the story turns out from the beginning.)  The novel isn't structured to have heightening tension and then come to a climax; the tone doesn't ever really change.  If anything, the novel gets more tedious in the last 80 or so pages after Davy decisively turns against religion and (perhaps) finds his father on page 182.

The extravagant praise we see all over the book is perhaps largely the product of its time period; jokes about farts, scenes of rough sex play, and relentless attacks on religion presumably felt fresher and braver in 1964 than they do today, and no doubt Heinlein and Sturgeon were eager to cheer on a kindred spirit.

I think an interesting question to ask about Davy is, why (or to what extent) is it a science fiction novel?  Fawning critics compare Davy to Tom Jones (18th century) and Huckleberry Finn (19th century) and Davy's adventures, like stealing clothes from a village, having sex in the woods, and witnessing religious zealotry and wars fought with spears, fit perfectly into some medieval, Renaissance, or Early Modern setting. There's no aliens or telepathy or high technology in Davy, and the atomic war/mutants stuff is used surprisingly sparingly.  I guess the post-apocalyptic setting allows Pangborn to combine his pre-industrial concerns with long passages about the New York, Pennsylvania and New England with which he is so familiar.

So, a disappointment.  My eagerness to read the other two Pangborn novels I recently aquired, West of the Sun and The Judgement of Eve, has been seriously diminished.  

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The back of my edition of Davy has a lot of interesting advertising.

The "A Selection of Fiction" page includes writers who live on the porous border between SF and mainstream fiction, like Ray Bradbury, Doris Lessing, Anthony Burgess, and Nevil Shute.  The "A Selection of Non-Fiction" page gives one a sense of the historical moment in which Davy was published, its political and social controversies: there's The Complete Book of Birth Control, sponsored by Planned Parenthood, Martin Luther King's Stride Toward Freedom, books on prostitutes, pornography, and psychoanalysis.  My favorite, though, is the capsule description of Dan Mannix's Memoirs of a Sword Swallower; I find the phrase "Flamo the Great exploded that night in front of Krinko's side show" hilarious--funnier than any joke in Davy.