Night Lamp

Rating:
Summary: Good book for Vance fans, but not his best
Review: Night Lamp will be satisfying to Vance fans: it is Science Fiction in Vance's most familiar style, elegantly written, full of ironic bits, often downright funny, portraying at least three complex social structures based on intricate manners. It also shares the weaknesses of much of Vance's work: it is discursive, the Science content is notional at best (for instance, his spaceships seem basically to be automobiles that can fly in space and travel at many multiples of the speed of light without relativistic effects), and it seemed short one rewrite.

The story is that of Jaro Fath, a young boy who is found, on the remote planet of Camberwell, by Hilyer and Anthea Fath, while in the process of being beaten nearly to death by local thugs. The Faths rescue Jaro, and in the process of restoring him to health it is necessary that his memory of the first six years of his life be erased. Hilyer and Anthea take Jaro back to their home world of Gallingale, where they are somewhat unconventional (by Gallingale standards) university professors, and they raise Jaro as their son.

Jaro grows up intelligent and strong, but his life is complicated by several factors. He hears voices in his head which seem to be associated with his early life. His ambition to become a spaceman and seek out the mysteries of the lost six years of his life is thwarted as much as possible by the Faths, who fear that he will come to grief tracing his apparently violent history. And he inherits from the Faths disdain for the social system of Gallingale, which is based on the concept of "striving" up social "ledges", trying to reach clubs of higher and higher status. This disdain leads to conflict with his fellow students, and naturally seems to increase his interest in a classmate (Skirlet Hutsenreiter, a wonderful name!) who is hereditarily a Clam Muffin: that is, a member of one of the highest ranked clubs.

As Jaro comes to maturity, he slowly learns more and more about his past, and of course is eventually free to track down the mystery of his birth and how he came to be alone on Camberwell. However, as I said, the plot is discursive, and the resolutions seem too often to be the result of coincidence. Often great difficulties melt out of Jaro's way. Furthermore, the climaxes of the book (there are a few) seem muffled: and the final climax is not that of the original plot problem but of one introduced only a few tens of pages prior to the end. That said, the book is interesting to read throughout, and Jaro's story is romantic and is resolved more or less satisfactorily.

The prose style is a true joy: Vance is his inimitable self. His writing has a reputation for ornateness, but it seems to me that his sentences are in fact simple, well constructed, and often relatively short. The ornateness comes from the wonderful names (of characters, of stars and planets, of the clubs on Gallingale), and from the elegance and formality of the writing, including the dialect. Vance's work has usually, it seems to me, had an ironic edge: this book has full measure of irony, and is also often much more forthrightly funny than many of his novels.

Rating:
Summary: Good book for Vance fans, but not his best
Review: Night Lamp will be satisfying to Vance fans: it is Science Fiction in Vance's most familiar style, elegantly written, full of ironic bits, often downright funny, portraying at least three complex social structures based on intricate manners. It also shares the weaknesses of much of Vance's work: it is discursive, the Science content is notional at best (for instance, his spaceships seem basically to be automobiles that can fly in space and travel at many multiples of the speed of light without relativistic effects), and it seemed short one rewrite.

The story is that of Jaro Fath, a young boy who is found, on the remote planet of Camberwell, by Hilyer and Anthea Fath, while in the process of being beaten nearly to death by local thugs. The Faths rescue Jaro, and in the process of restoring him to health it is necessary that his memory of the first six years of his life be erased. Hilyer and Anthea take Jaro back to their home world of Gallingale, where they are somewhat unconventional (by Gallingale standards) university professors, and they raise Jaro as their son.

Jaro grows up intelligent and strong, but his life is complicated by several factors. He hears voices in his head which seem to be associated with his early life. His ambition to become a spaceman and seek out the mysteries of the lost six years of his life is thwarted as much as possible by the Faths, who fear that he will come to grief tracing his apparently violent history. And he inherits from the Faths disdain for the social system of Gallingale, which is based on the concept of "striving" up social "ledges", trying to reach clubs of higher and higher status. This disdain leads to conflict with his fellow students, and naturally seems to increase his interest in a classmate (Skirlet Hutsenreiter, a wonderful name!) who is hereditarily a Clam Muffin: that is, a member of one of the highest ranked clubs.

As Jaro comes to maturity, he slowly learns more and more about his past, and of course is eventually free to track down the mystery of his birth and how he came to be alone on Camberwell. However, as I said, the plot is discursive, and the resolutions seem too often to be the result of coincidence. Often great difficulties melt out of Jaro's way. Furthermore, the climaxes of the book (there are a few) seem muffled: and the final climax is not that of the original plot problem but of one introduced only a few tens of pages prior to the end. That said, the book is interesting to read throughout, and Jaro's story is romantic and is resolved more or less satisfactorily.

The prose style is a true joy: Vance is his inimitable self. His writing has a reputation for ornateness, but it seems to me that his sentences are in fact simple, well constructed, and often relatively short. The ornateness comes from the wonderful names (of characters, of stars and planets, of the clubs on Gallingale), and from the elegance and formality of the writing, including the dialect. Vance's work has usually, it seems to me, had an ironic edge: this book has full measure of irony, and is also often much more forthrightly funny than many of his novels.

Rating:
Summary: Glorious, quirky, mind expanding, Vance at his best
Review: Superbly eerie SF masterwork, there isnt another writer in the world like Vance. To criticise him for not describing the detailed functioning of spacecraft is to totally miss the point of this wonderful, haunting author, easily the finest prose stylist ever to work in the field.

Rating:
Summary: Another visit to the Gaean Reach
Review: The emotional clock of human aging measures the deaths of those we love and the extent of our inability to understand those younger than ourselves. As we zoom to 2000 and the SF mills belch out an endless mass of dark and anti-intellectual landfill-bound material, we can still re-read our Vance novels and take joy when Father Time grants us one more. The loss of Carl Sagan and Issac Asimov revealed to me what is to come.....one day I will read the last Vance story. [e-mail] describes "Night Lamp" well, all I add is that I hope that this is not the final legacy.

Rating:
Summary: Another Vance masterpiece
Review: The review in Interzone said it all: "Rush out and buy this glorious book!" At age 80, Vance has lost none of his inventiveness and demonstrates he is still one of the finest prose stylists writing in the English language.

Rating:
Summary: Vance's summation of his career and universe
Review: This is perhaps the final Vance book and seems a distillation of his science fiction. We see familiar themes and characters and plot devices, but they are lingered over and touched with even more bittersweet irony than is his wont. Perhaps not the greatest Vance, but still a wonderful book. A book full of wonders. It is written in a slower pace than usual and is somehow sweeter and warmer. A legacy, not a firework

Rating:
Summary: My favorite Vance book...
Review: This is Vance at his absolute best. Wry humor, imagination, action, great characters, in short, everything a good book needs is right here and done so masterfully! Any Vance is special, this particular Vance is extraordinary. An absolute must-read...

Rating:
Summary: My favorite Vance book...
Review: This is Vance at his absolute best. Wry humor, imagination, action, great characters, in short, everything a good book needs is right here and done so masterfully! Any Vance is special, this particular Vance is extraordinary. An absolute must-read...

Rating:
Summary: Vance¿s best book?
Review: Well, how would I know - I'm a long way from having read them all. But I'm sure it's a candidate. Of the ones I've read it's the hardest to describe without giving something away that is better kept secret. Even the signifigance of the title isn't revealed until well after the halfway mark. I will say that, so far as I can tell, all of the instruments in the Vance orchestra sound at least once; and we are treated to both tragedy and farce and several things, like the background sensation of chilling weirdness, that aren't even in between. I wish I could say what the highlights are without spoiling the surprise.