The Unholy City

An interesting short novel sharing many tropes with the author's better known -- and better -- The Circus of Dr. Lao.

It begins like an old-fashioned adventure novel. The hero's plane crashes in the middle of a strange land. As the only survivor, and not wanting to waste anything, he collects everyone's money (drachmas, but not, a footnote says, Greek drachmas) and sets off. A paragraph later he meets Vicq Ruyz, his guide for the rest of the book. After an episode in an Mongol-ish tribal village from which they are expelled for sneaking into a temple to see the White Goddess, they arrive at Heilar-Wey. At this point any resemblance to H Rider Haggard disappears. Heilar-Way is like 1937 vision of a future LA, where cars with 18 or 20 show more cylinders race from place to place at 172 miles per hour. Most of the story involves Vicq and our hero going from one bar to the next, drinking "big zellums of szelack", hoping to have a bacchanal that will allow Vicq to die longing for one more moment of life. Along the way, there are numerous major traffic accidents with hundreds of fatalities, caused either by parades and riots of three protesting factions of the city or a giant tiger. Things eventually come to an end.

Major trigger warning regarding racial elements. The N word is used frequently by several characters, especially when describing how pouring szelack onto a black piano player turned his hair yellow. Both City and Lao have a unsettling scene involving black men and white women. In Dr Lao that scene was a sideshow entertainment for white males. In City, the event is the subject of a trial of a black man for rape and murder. The szelack scene seems clearly meant to point out how blacks are not considered human in Heilar-Wey. The main point made about the court trial is how surprising it is that there's a trial at all. Normally a black many would just be lynched, guilty or not.

The problem with The Unholy City is that everyone is unlikable and the theme of one long quest for a party does not provide a strong backbone. In Dr Lao, the arrival of the circus, the sideshows, and the final climactic acts in the big tent, provided a progress bar of sorts, with a satisfying wrapup. There is much to see in the Unholy City, but no real story.

This is a trait common to the only writer I can think of comparable to Finney: R A Lafferty. Many of Vicq Ruyz stories and rants, as well as the surprisingly poetic testimony of the man accused of rape and murder, would be right at home in any Lafferty story.

If you read and liked The Circus of Dr Lao, then this is worth seeking out. If you to read something very different by Finney, try the non-fantastic Past the End of Pavement. show less

I started reading this book thinking "wow, this is really weird," and pretty much kept that feeling throughout the entire story. The premise is that our hero finds himself the only survivor of a crashed plane, helps himself to all of the money in the dead passengers pockets (why not? they won't need it) and also a sandwich the stewardess had been making directly before the crash, and wanders back towards civilization. While on the road he meets a lone traveler who tells him a sob story about his great debts, there is a lightbulb moment of "hey! you need money, I have money!," and the pair set off together to spend ALL of the money in a madcap, drunken bacchanal.

That's about it for the storyline. There is a LOT of drinking, some minor show more absurdist politics, and a few uncomfortably racist bits (but I remind myself that it was written in the 1930s).

This book is just FULL of weird. show less