I have read several of Lafferty's novels. This one is one of the most opaque, and that's saying something. The speaker-protagonist of this novel, Epistektes, is a machine created by and from the members of the Institute for Impure Science. Both the machine and the Institute figure in a number of Lafferty's short stories, but this novel gives them a lot of room to play.

There seem to be obscure autobiographical elements for Lafferty in several of the characters, and I suspect the rambling, poetic and philosophical book of being an allegorical form of introspection. Still, it's a fun tale eventuating in the discovery of the shape of the universe. It often sports with Christian myth in tantalizing ways, and it has a sort of Fortean jollity that I found enchanting.

This is one of those surreal, experimental science fiction novels that were very popular for a while in the 60s and 70s, the kind that make you think that perhaps the writer was on some really interesting drugs and that if you could get hold of some of them for yourself, the book might make a lot more sense. In the case of this particular work, I found that if I could achieve a certain Zen-like state in which I just let it wash over me, it sort of worked, but I have trouble keeping that up for more than a page or two, so it kept see-sawing back and forth between being sort of pleasantly bizarre and being just plain annoying.

It's nearly impossible to decide how to rate this. It's actually a good example of the kind of thing it is, and it was interesting to read, but I can't say I recommend it or even that I entirely enjoyed it. I'm going to call it three stars, in recognition of the fact that Lafferty does seem to know what he's doing, even if he's not exactly doing it for me. ( )