Dreams, dimensions, and Scooby Doo endings. Lincoln's Dreams by Connie Willis
Written: Apr 27 '03 (Updated Nov 25 '04)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Interesting fast moving story, appeals to history lovers
Cons: 2D character in 4D world, Scooby Doo ending.
The Bottom Line: Read this book if you are into civil war, dream interpretation, or falling hopelessly in love with neurotics. If you dont like Scooby, dont read it.
|
|
|
| snpmurray's Full Review: Connie Willis - Lincoln's Dreams |
An impressive first novel, and winner of the John W. Campbell award, "Lincoln's Dreams" is an exotic blend of Psychodrama, science fiction, and love story.
Jeff Johnston is a researcher in the employ of a historical fiction writer. He spends his days exploring library catalogs, and interviewing historians, acquiring tiny tidbits of data regarding the life and times of Abraham Lincoln for his pedantic employers' future novels. His employer, Broun, is particularly obsessed with dreams which Lincoln had near to the time of his death, and their meaning.
By coincidence, one of Jeff's old college roommates, Richard Madison, is a sleep science researcher. Broun has invited Richard along to a soiree. When Jeff is introduced to Richard's neurotic girlfriend, it is love at first sight. Annie is haunted constantly by her dreams, which have come to dominate both her nights and her days. As she describes them to Jeff, he begins to recognize more and more of the details.....it seems, though incredible, that Annie is dreaming the dreams of Robert E. Lee. She is night-by-night reliving the nightmares of Lee's war years, in excruciating detail, without understanding it.
Jeff, quickly sequesters her from the company of psychiatrist Richard, who has been surreptitiously drugging her to suppress her dreams, and embarks on a mission to make clear the source of Annie's dreams, and determine just how far into the psyche of Lee the dreams will take them both. What follows is a waking nightmare for them both. Meaning well, Jeff takes the troubled Annie to one after another civil war battleground, hoping that the experience might lay to rest forever the dreams, but at the same time satisfy his morbid fascination with their source. He is hopelessly in love with both Annie and the dreams. As a longtime researcher into the civil war, he is enraptured by the first-person veracity of the dreams, but totally in love with Annie, a fragile and delicate persona, he wishes only to bring an end to her nightmares.
They are hounded by psychiatrist Richard, who, unaware of their location, can lure them back to him only with endlessly reconfigured diagnoses recorded on Broun's answering machine, and planted fears of the destruction of Annie's tender sanity. Jeff and Annie live on the run, from Richard, from the dreams, and ultimately from the whole civil war. They are constantly uncertain of their fate. Annie is convinced by this time that she somehow makes atonement for Lee's war horrors by reliving his anguish-ridden dreams. Can Annie's dreams ever come to an end and give her peace? Can Jeff find an experience in the battlefields of the civil war which will give catharsis to both Lee and Annie both? Will the evil psychiatrist addle both their brains and bring them, whimpering, to his Thorazine-laden door? Al l these things and more stand ready to be revealed to you in "Lincoln's dreams"
And so much for the plot! Good material, indeed!
And Connie Willis does make good use of this material. This short, fast-moving novel distinguishes itself quickly by the very addictive writing style of the writer. Willis writing, both here, and in many other of her books, discriminates itself by taking a detailed analysis of a historical situation, and then blending around that situation a science fiction, set in our own time. This works wonderfully. Her chapters often (indeed almost always) begin with interesting tidbits of information regarding the period in question (in this case the civil war) and then this tidbit is related, blended, and finally transmuted back into a part of the ongoing, in the present, happen-as-you-read-it moment of pure fiction.
Fiction, and particularly science fiction, all too often carries the stigma of a pure unbelieveability. This style of Willis blurs that border for us, Willis is a skillful artist, adept in blurring the borders of reality and fiction with softer pastel shades.
The story moves quickly. Events, locations, findings and dramas are all so swiftly described that the reader is literally swept forward through this book. always interested by what may be coming next, and this is ever inventive.
I do nevertheless find three minor issues to describe as negatives for this piece, but these are perhaps as related to my own personal ignorance's as anything else.....first, this book most certainly assumes that the reader has more than a passing foreknowledge of the civil war of the United States. Living in the States, it is obvious, and sensible, that this is covered in some depth in the schooling of most Americans. Nevertheless, coming to this novel without the benefit of that background, I found that there were many occasions where I was able to only infer on which side combatant generals were from the context of the page, but even then with no certainty. No background is offered regarding what led to, and how the war progressed, facts that, to my own display of ignorance I could not tell you to this day. This I write, since for the edification of any readers in the same boat as myself, this certainly distracted from my enjoyment of the novel.
A second criticism here, and this time more universal, comes with the character of Annie. Utterly central though this character is to the plot of the book, she is actually portrayed, I found, in the most two-dimensional sense. It is an element of plot that Annie has no past in terms of her choosing not to reveal her home, etc., but Annie is never more deeply portrayed than "neurotic female stands in graveyard and has bad dream." I feel that the characterization here was weak. It is Jeff who carries the whole reader-concern here. If Annie had had more dimensions, I would have had a great deal more interest in the last three chapters of the book!
And this is my final critique. Oddly, although I have reviewed two other Connie Willis pieces for Epinions, I had forgotten this weakness in her novels, and was reminded of it only when I encountered it yet again in this piece....Connie Willis has an unfortunate habit of giving her novels the most "Scooby Doo" endings you could possibly Imagine.
Scooby Doo endings? What do you mean, Sean?
Okay....well, Connie Willis would clearly very much like her novels to fall also into the category of mysteries, in addition to sci-fi and Historical dramas. Naturally, in order to accomplish this desire, she threads her stories with a number of factors which have an ambiguous source.....is Annie really dreaming Lee's dreams, or is it psychosis? Did Richard really poison her with Thorazine or is she totally neurotic, etc., etc. The unfortunate thing in her books, and this is repeated in book after book, is that Willis does not make herself a mystery writer in order to incite this air of mystery. The true mystery writer hides clues to the true outcome of the mystery throughout the book, permitting the avid mystery reader to indulge themselves on their favored theory as they pick through the evidence throughout the duration of the book. Instead, Connie Willis is from the Scooby Doo school of mystery writers......
The Scooby Doo mystery writer makes the source of all the ambiguities completely mysterious throughout the story, then, 95% of the way through the story, suddenly introduces ten new "previously unrevealed" facts into the narrative which suddenly make the source of the mystery obvious to all, all in an instant, case solved, no more mystery.
This, I regret to inform you Connie, does not a mystery novel make.
I recommend Isaac Asimov if you wish to encounter science fiction mystery novels.
So, all in all, its an excellent read, quick, exciting and constantly interesting, but plagued again for me by Willis's weaknesses, regardless of what the rest of the reviewing press seems to think. If you enjoyed her other books, or haven't tried any Willis yet, I'd advise reading it. Personally, I'm getting a bit soured by the Scooby Doos, and the two dimensional characters in a four dimensional plot.
Hey, no accounting for taste eh?
Some of my other science fiction book reviews:
Rama Revealed
Prelude to Space
Stand on Zanzibar
The Demolished Man
The Stars my Destination
Cat's Cradle
The Gods Themselves
Watchmen
A Canticle for Leibowitz
The Hammer of God
The Left Hand of Darkness
Flowers for Algernon
Lord of Light
Rendevous with Rama
The Tombs of Atuan
The Dispossessed
I am Legend
The Einstein Intersection
Earth Abides
Peace on Earth
The Farthest Shore
Methuselah's Children
A Call to Arms
To your Scattered Bodies Go
The Lion of Comarre / Against the Fall of Night
To Say Nothing of the Dog
The Doomsday Book
Frankenstein Unbound
Batman - The Dark Knight Returns
Imperial Earth
A Case of Conscience
Solaris
The Sands of Mars
The Land of Laughs
Eden
His Masters Voice
Citizen of the Galaxy
King David's Spaceship
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Double Star
The Fabulous Riverboat
Songs of Distant Earth
Way Station
The Fountains of Paradise
The Long Tomorrow
Lincolns Dreams
Alas Babylon
More Than Human
1984
The Forever War
All the Myriad Ways
I Sing the Body Electric
Gateway
Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said
This Immortal
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
snpmurray
|
 - Top 1000 |
|
Location: Sedona, Arizona
Reviews written: 286
Trusted by: 178 members
About Me:
Compost
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.