There is an old Hollywood maxim,”start with an earthquake and build up to a climax”,this could have been written not about movies,but about Alfred Bester
The book Tiger Tiger,sometimes called The Stars My Destination is ,in my opinion not only one of the best Sci-Fi books,but also one of the best books ever written,…Bester’s style is everything at breakneck speed,pared down to the minimum,if it’s not needed to advance the flow of the narrative then its either missing in the first place or is tossed aside.The story thunders along discarding dazzling ideas and concepts,that other writers would waste pages or even chapters over.It’s not all speed and no substance, he was also an extremely talented and intelligent writer,he plays with language and even with typography.It’s good old fashioned entertainment,but the book also raises some really heavyweight questions.Reading it,it’s difficult to believe it was written in the early Fifties.It really has not aged at all.With this novel,Bester single handedly invented Cyberpunk and also heavily inspired the New Wave movement in the UK.
The first time i read it,i couldn’t believe how fast paced it was,after a few chapters i was thinking there was no way Bester could keep this speed up.It turned out that i read the entire book in one sitting,stayed up most of the night to do it,it was that gripping.Since then i have re-read it many times,a book this well written is more rewarding the second or even third time.My copy has now fallen to bits,the binding has snapped and many pages are loose,can there be a greater testament to a book than that?
Sometime around the end of the war Bester found the story of what is the basis for the main character Tiger Tiger.Some say he found the story of Poon Lim in a newspaper,some say in National Geographic.It doesn’t matter,a seed had been sown.In addition to this found story,Bester added into the mix a Sci-Fi reinterpretation of The Count Of Monte Cristo.
The novel’s hero is a man named Gulliver Foyle,perhaps that should be anti hero,as when we first me Foyle he is not a pleasant man.The book charts his growth from illiterate Mechanic’s Mate 3rd Class to,ultimately the saviour of Mankind.
The story is set against the backdrop of the 24th century,Man has colonised much of the Solar System including some of the outer planets’ satellites,a trade war between the Inner Planets and the Outer Satellites soon escalates into full blown conflict.Mankind has also learned how to “Jaunte”,or teleport from one locale to another.It has a profound effect on society,a whole world on the Jaunte means that the poor can go and squat anywhere they like,diseases flash around the world in minutes,criminals jaunte with the night,homes and business have to be hidden behind jaunteproof mazes and there is a return to the worst prudishness of Victorian times.
The story begins with Foyle as the only survivor on a partially destroyed spacecraft called the Nomad,a victim of the war.He has lived in the ships’ only airtight room,a tool locker, for a hundred and seventy days,periodically venturing out into the ship for supplies of food and air.He is a “man of physical strength and intellectual potential stunted by lack of ambition.The stereotype Common Man,some unexpected shock might possibly awaken him,but Psych cannot find the key.Do not recommend for promotion.Foyle has reached a dead end“.Foyle gets his unexpected shock,when after attracting the attention of the Vorga,a sister ship to the Nomad,he is left to rot,the Vorga passes him by.Motivated by an all consuming desire for revenge on the Vorga and all her crew,Foyle does what society has been unable to do for him,he finds his own key and he rescues himself.
Managing to fire one of the ships engines he sets off on a long trek to extract revenge and in the process he becomes a driven, educated and highly intelligent man.Bester allows Foyle to grow up and really become an adult,and in the end a kind of saviour.It’s really quite a transformation,in the beginning Foyle is guilty of many hideous crimes,he’s a rapist,a murderer,a blackmailer and a thief amongst many others.Every one of these acts is only to cover his tracks or bring him a step closer to his precious revenge.Bester doesn’t mess about with Foyle’s character,he really lets you know he is a nasty bit of work,although Besters’ genius is,as the story progresses,to make you like Foyle,or at least admire him.
Tiger Tiger goes beyond a simple revenge tragedy,one of the books’ central themes revolves around a substance called Pyre which Foyle finds in the safe on the Nomad.Pyre is an explosive,but an explosive on the order of the Big Bang which can only be detonated by willing it to combust.This represents and externalises Mankind’s wish for destruction.There are several other similarly large themes,like the weird psychedelic section as the book nears it’s climax,where Foyle experiences Synesthesia,when taken with the telesends and various other motifs,they all seem to point to Bester wishing to break down the barriers between thought and action.Foyle himself is used to symbolise Man’s wish to control,during his trek to find Vorga,he is forcibly given a Maori style full face tattoo,which he later pays an underworld doctor to remove,however, whenever he loses emotional control the pattern of the tattoo shows blood red,His inner emotion is plain on his face for all to see,Foyle has to learn how to control himself,something which he never truly manages to do until it matters.
It is a truly wondrous book,which is something that Bester never quite managed to replicate,much of the rest of his novels though good,do not really have the same sense of being complete and can be a little patchy in comparison.I can’t recommend it enough.
Buy It
