The Devil is Dead

 
 
The Devil is Dead

RA Lafferty
Avon

1967

 

 

RA Lafferty belongs to category of authors who I classify as 'Catholic science fiction,' which is a category that really only exists inside my head. Into it, I'd place CS Lewis, Madeline L'Engel, maybe David Lindsay, Cordwainer Smith, and perhaps some others. 

 
They're all authors who wrote a blend of scifi and fantasy that's both heavily infused with religious symbolism and almost entirely unlike anything being written by their contemporaries. It's weird, in the way that outsider art is weird, because they're not really a part of the scene of scifi writers who are working with the same editors and publishers, whose work defines the genre. And it's earnest and moral (sometimes moral-izing) in a way that you don't see in the rational, atheistic mainstream of scifi.

 

The Devil is Dead is divided into roughly two parts. In both, we follow Finnegan, an alcoholic sailor who finds himself caught up in what appears to be a pre-historic plot to destroy human civilization. Writing in the late 60s, Lafferty described his story as taking place 'a few years ago.' I checked a calendar, and based on the date given for Easter, that means the first part takes place in fall 1947 and spring 48. The second part probably goes into 1949 or 50.

 
In the first part, Finnegan comes to from a long bender to find himself befriended to millionaire Saxon Seaworthy. He gets recruited to go on a round-the-world boat trip with a crew that includes the Devil, a mermaid, and an ogress. They look human, and in this part, it's unclear whether this is literally true, a metaphor, Finnegan's imagination, or some combination. We learn that Seaworthy previously killed the Devil, and plans to kill him again. Finnegan realizes that he and the mermaid are, and ought to be, on this second Devil's side. But after a climactic bit of mutiny and counter-mutiny, the Devil ends up dead again, and Finnegan flees with a million dollars of Seaworthy's money.

 
The second part is much more rollicking and loose. Finnegan goes on a year-long bender and meets a variety of tall-tale tellers, and gradually pieces together what actually happened in the first part of the book.

 
What we gradually learn is that there are people 'of the old blood' who form a second human species, who are at war with the people of the 'new blood,' which is us. These people are like nephilim or demigods, like atavistic Neaderthals or Cesare Lombroso's evolutionary throw-back 'Criminal Men.' No one answer is definitively right. Everything involving them ends up involving analogic equation with myth, uncanny doppelgangers, psychic communication, and the like.

 
Finnegan has some of the old blood, and has to decide if he will help Seaworthy burn the world down, or oppose him, possibly at the cost of his life. The last chapter takes place right before Seaworthy walks into a trap with Finnegan as bait, a confrontation that will probably lead to one or both of their deaths. Before the confrontation, we finally get a definitive account of where the two Devils came from, and what happened when Seaworthy killed the first, and the second took his place without anyone noticing. And then the book ends, right before the confrontation that would finish the story.

 
This was a weird one, but kind of fun. There's not much plot, but Lafferty takes a lot of pleasure in telling it. The characters swap tall tales and shaggy dog stories and boast of improbable feats. The central mystery probably sounds silly if you spell it out too neatly, but Lafferty talks around it instead, offering multiple almost-compatible explanations, like you might see as people try to make sense of something they don't fully understand. I have a sense that fans of Samuel Delany would like this one; it reminds me a little of his book Nova.