I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

The basic premise of the book is that God offers Lucifer a second chance if he can live one month as a human. Declan Gunn is depressed London novelist contemplating suicide so God puts his soul on ice for a month and Lucifer takes control. This is an at times hilariously funny novel as Lucifer immerses himself in the pleasures of the flesh. The descriptions of Lucifer's reactions to smelling the various odours that make up a walk through the London streets are particularly vivid. The ideas that Duncan raises in this novel are not new but the first person narrative helps to create a compelling portrait of a fallen angel, who may or may not be ready to return to the fold. My only criticism is that Duncan's prose is very dense and I had to show more stop reading at regular intervals in order to assimilate the events narrated. show less

A first-person confession from Lucifer on the occasion of his chance to live as a mortal for one month in the body of Declan Gunn. This chance comes from God, who hopes that Lucifer will learn something in that time which will persuade Lucifer to accept His offer of redemption. The result is often quite funny, and Gunn writes well--his descriptions and observations are often startlingly, wonderfully apt. The biggest success of the novel is probably making Lucifer a sympathetic character, someone for whom you want to root. The biggest failure of the novel is certainly the lack of any understanding of what one is rooting for Lucifer for. Not to win, surely? We like the angels as they are on the page here, and Lucifer is a bad piece of show more work. Perhaps I was rooting for him to accept redemption? Not a question, really. I was, but I'm not sure the book wanted me to. And in the absence of that surety, I was left asking myself, "What is this for? This is all very clever, and well done you, for that, Duncan, but what's the pay-off?" The further I got in the book, the more I was afraid there would be no satisfying ending, and thus the more I found the humor and bad-shit-goes-down (he is the devil, after all) of the thing wearying. I wanted to like I, Lucifer a good bit more than I did, but in the end I can't help thinking that it's largely an opportunity lost. show less

This psychological portrayal of one of history's most hated figures made me think about free will and what I would suffer in order to maintain it. When God offers Lucifer the opportunity to "redeem" himself by living as a human for one month, Lucifer smirks, says yes, and proceeds to enjoy his one month vacation. Through his actions and his thoughts while being Declan Gun, Lucifer reveals a story not of good versus evil but of an indomitable will versus an indomitable will.

Two things are going on in this story: one, Lucifer is living (a version of) Declan Gun's life, finally experiencing a world with sensory perception; two, Lucifer is writing a story about what really happened in heaven. The second was more interesting to me, being show more theological and all; and yet the first reminded me of the beauty of being alive. Luce gets drunk on sight and sound, smell, taste, and touch through walks in the rain, cocaine, sex, food, alcohol: everything is up for grabs. The beauty of his thoughts as he relishes even the smells of the dirtiest places made me almost feel guilty for ignoring, or rather taking for granted, my ability to sense the world around me.

The real pull for me, however, was the theology expressed in the book. I haven't even begun to wrap my mind around all of the variant, tantalizing ideas running rampant. Apparently, Lucifer had a good reason for getting upset with God; he was sick of the "undiluted adulation" God expected from the angels. Lucifer just wanted to control his own life; he wanted choice. Good for him. A life of perpetual kiss-assery sounds pretty damn bleak to me.

When it comes down to it though, the story is just dirty fun. show less

The language. I have to begin with the language of this book, the captivating voice of the narrator, the unique cadence of the prose. I would find it worthwhile for that alone. What further amazed me is the fact that, up until the very last sentence, I didn't know how it would end. You can't put the last several pages down (and the rest of them are pretty difficult to set aside). There's a glimpse of a world that makes a very different sort of sense from the old mythologies we know and love, a world that flows logically from their tales when one accounts for the lens of history, but a world that manages to use those tales to turn what we usually know on its head. This is my favorite type of story, and the author does it impeccably.

This book was always going have to vie in my affections with the Lucifer graphic novel series by Mike Carey. As far as I'm concerned, Carey's devil is definitive. 'I, Lucifer' didn't manage to supplant him. Duncan's devil, inhabiting a human body as a deal with god, is more loquacious and frivolous, but considerably less sophisticated and cunning. I found that 'I, Lucifer' only really became engrossing towards the end, when Lucifer was trying to decide how long to stay in a human body. For much of the first person narrative, he meandered then periodically tried to jolt the reader with 'suddenly paedophilia!'-type interjections. Although all this was engagingly written, it didn't really go anywhere that interesting.

I suppose any story show more about Lucifer has to address the balance between a sympathetic and horrifying portrayal. Carey got around this by making the devil essentially disinterested in humanity; his plans and concerns were on a much larger scale. Whereas Duncan's Lucifer chats gleefully about torture and child-rape but, once in a mortal body, commits only glamorised sins. He sleeps with whores, takes drugs, and parties hard, but even tabloids could scarcely manage any shock about that. Perhaps the reader is meant to think that Lucifer is pretending to be a lightweight? The monologues about Himmler and the Inquisition give the opposite impression, though. The deus ex machina (not literally) ending is quite fun, but the needless postscript irritated me. In fact, the man who Lucifer inhabited, Declan, never seemed sympathetic to me and I wished that all the female characters would punch him.

Overall, 'I, Lucifer' is frothy but has some good moments. Lucifer himself reminded me of Lestat from The Vampire Chronicles, notably 'Tale of the Body Thief'. The thing is, Lestat is supposed to style himself as Lucifer, whereas in this book Lucifer comes off as a pastiche of Lestat. There's probably some meta irony there. show less

I ADORE Glen Duncan, and I adored the first few chapters of this book, but then I just got... bored. I think the devil should be able to hold my attention better, but his snappy banter just got a bit monotonous. If a book isn't strong on plot, as this one isn't, it needs something else to hold interest. Whilst it succeeded at times, what with the whole so-this-is-what-it's-like-to-be-human! subtext, it never deviated from there. It didn't go deeper. Moments of beautiful, lyrical writing here, but ultimately I found it disappointing.

I read "I, Lucifer" for a book club, and to start with I couldn't get on with it at all. In fact the main reason that I've finished it so quickly, is that I wanted to get it over and done with.

The book is written in the first person by Lucifer, and the main thing that grated on me was Lucifer's 'voice' . However once Lucifer got into Declan's body, there was less waffle and more action and the book started to grow on me. I loved the way that Lucifer was blown away by having the five senses, and took ages to walk anywhere as he was always getting distracted by the smell of a dog's paw or the sight of a flower-garden. "Meanwhile the bloody reds and coronal golds bedevilled me like circling sprites; greens of olive, lime and pea spiralled show more around me, flaming yellows of saffron and primrose . . . Hard to tell whether I was about to pass through into some other dimension or simply vomit onto the seething lawn."

The plot was unpredictable, with the story of the film script and Declan/Lucifer's earthly relationships keeping me involved even though I never got to like the language used to tell the story. The digressions about Lucifer's non-corporeal existence and his feelings about God, Jesus and The Fall were an interesting sub-plot. And the poem by Rilke which Raphael showed to Lucifer at the end of the book, summed up perfectly the angels' experience of becoming mortal. In fact I suspect that the poem may have been the catalyst that gave Glen Duncan the idea for this novel in the first place.

So to sum up, although I started off distinctly underwhelmed by "I, Lucifer", it won me round in the end. show less