Way Station by Clifford Simak
Written: Feb 21 '03 (Updated Nov 25 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent writer, excellent story, clever and touching
Cons: None I can think of
The Bottom Line: Highly recommended. Unique amazing story of an immortal man , Earths only ambassador to the stars, emotional and intellectual writing.
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| snpmurray's Full Review: Way Station Books |
Winner of the 1963 Hugo award for best novel, Clifford Simak's Way Station is emotionally and intellectually outstanding.
Enoch Wallace lives on his own in rural Wisconsin. He is a man who keeps himself to himself and minds his own business. He lives in an area where everybody minds their own business. He goes for a walk with his rifle every morning, sits out on his porch every afternoon when the weather permits, and likes strong coffee and salty bacon. An unremarkable life, not unpleasant, one might think. Such an unremarkable rural existence conveniently disguises the more remarkable aspects of Enoch Wallace's life. Enoch Wallace is one hundred years old, but has not aged a day since the age of thirty. His house is completely impenetrable and indestructible to any weapon. And for work , Enoch Wallace is employed as Earth's sole ambassador to the galactic community. Enoch's house is a way-station, a stopping-off point for travelers moving across the stars by means of such relay stations.
Enoch sees to it that the alien visitors to his home are comfortably accommodated there until they wish to depart. He has spent many evenings chatting to species whose physical and mental forms are so different to his own that only their technology permits him to communicate with them. He made frequent visiting alien friends, and his house is scattered with their many gifts. He keeps voluminous journals, cross-referenced by date, star, species and technology, which he hopes one day to have the chance to present to his own species. Mankind is currently considered too backward for admission to the galactic community. Enoch anxiously awaits the day that his own species will be able to use the way stations as a route to the heavens.
Enoch's life has continued in this fashion since the days of the civil war. Most recently, however, his life has begun to become more complicated. Enoch has generated too much local mythology, and just precisely too many official records of his existence to remain hidden any more. When officials begin to surreptitiously spy on Enoch they soon discover the impenetrability of his building. And that his windows do not reveal the interiors. In Enochs family plot, however, the remains of a visitor to his home from another star have been exhumed by the prying officials, and Enoch's existence is about to unravel.
Enoch has little contact with any humans at all, but one of the few that does have a relationship with him is a deaf mute girl from a local farm. His friendship with her leads to him sheltering her when her father had beaten her, and soon, in addition to the rest of the complications of Enoch's life, he is becoming the target for a drunken mob of locals.
Can Enoch make amends for the galactic faux-pas of the exhumation and save the reputation of mankind? Can one man single handedly represent his planet, when he not been truly human for a century, in the normal sense? What consequence when an immortal, who has sworn to live in secrecy, intercedes in the crudest affairs of local men? All of these questions and more will be examined in The Way Station.
This, then, is the plot. Obviously, original and full of potential. And I am delighted to report to you that all of that potential is realized. You could read this book in just a couple of hours , it is not enormously long, but that would be a terrific waste, I recommend you savor this book like fine wine.
It is too often the case that a book has excellent ideas, but that the author fails then to dig around these ideas, to humanize them with their emotional, cultural and intellectual impacts as they would apply to those involved. In science fiction, this seems to me to be an especially great tragedy, the ideas often being so unique. Here, in Way Station, we see the perfect balance.. a set of really cool ideas, which are built into a superb story, by someone whose writing is four-dimensional enough to really involve the reader in the lives of the principals.
The loneliness of Enoch Wallace is palpable on every page. Here is painted a portrait of a person deeply concerned for his fellow man, and yet he must by his own effort remain isolated from them. He wishes to communicate the amazing story of his own life to his fellows, as evidenced by his journals, but instead has to wear a mask of anonymity and banality when in actual contact with them.
The one breach in this wall of silence is his relationship with the deaf mute girl, Lucy. Lucy has never seemed concerned what Wallace might be, and with her he is relieved of the pressure of having to deliberately maintain a silence. Their non-verbal relationship adequately permits meaning, and a rare outlet from the cruelties of both their lives. Simak draws this relationship with only the most sparing strokes, and yet manages to achieve such a depth of feeling in his writing that I found myself in tears twice during my reading of this book, something which happens to me neither frequently nor easily.
Like many of my personal favorite science fiction books from this era, the grim specter of potential apocalypse looms in the background. I enjoy this tight feeling in these works (other examples of books in this vein might include "Canticle for Leibowitz", or "Earth Abides") and here, the topic of mans unworthiness for the galactic community resonates with the terror of nuclear war. Wallace keeps a graph, measuring many socio-economic variables, and lives in terror that his graph is trending inevitably toward apocalypse. For Wallace, the keeping of the way station is not a selfish pleasure; he lives with an eye to the future, as of course did many of Simak's peers when contemplating the consequences of nuclear war. Fortunately, however, Simak does not labor the point, but I make mention of this background tension, because I enjoy it. That's what you do in Epinions, right?!
This is also a book replete with excellent ideas and cool gadgets. For example Wallaces house, still resembling its original form on the outside, yet many floors deep , huge and invunerable on the inside, is a hive of neat things you want to know more about. Everything...the mechanics of the stations machinery, Wallaces journals, his gifts from aliens, the deep depths of the station, they are all described for us. They are described with enough exactitude to allow you to paint them in your mind as Simak intended, but with enough breathing room for your imagination to go to town on the details!! Delicious! As an aside to any of you familiar with Doctor Who, I was sharply reminded of the tardis by the whole setup. One day I'll start reviewing all my Doctor Who video collection, but life is sometimes too short!
Another issue given treatment in this book is spirituality. In Way Station, a singular machine exists in the galaxy, the purpose of which is to permit the citizens of the galaxy to commune with a spiritual force (the "G" word is consistently avoided however.) This is a force which gives all who behold it a sense of their affinity with all else in the universe. Recently lost, the absence of this machine is causing the sense of community in the VERY disparate members of the galactic community to fray at the edges. For a book published in 1963, I suspect cultural context, but hey, I wasn't there, Ill just say Simak writes it sensitively.
My partner thinks that the reason I enjoyed this book so much is because living forever on a farm in Wisconsin, never being bothered by people and spending all my working hours with space aliens is my idea of heaven.
No argument here...........
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
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snpmurray
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Location: Sedona, Arizona
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