Revisiting the Classics

As part of my program to revisit books that I liked when I was younger, I recently re-read Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land for the first time since I was in college.

Oh, my.

I should point out that as a young person I read all the Heinlein I could find.  (Have Space Suit, Will Travel remains one of my favorite books of all time.)  Nor did I stick just to the juveniles.  Heinlein had the gift of a perfect avuncular voice: if you were a bright kid of thirteen and curious about the world, he was the kindly uncle who would help you find out how things worked.  And as a thirteen-year-old I read Heinlein and I believed everything Uncle Bob told me: I believed we should bring back flogging (Starship Troopers), practice Upton Sinclair’s version of socialism (Beyond This Horizon), and practice Free Love (Stranger).

(Of course, when you come down to it, what thirteen-year-old male doesn’t want to practice Free Love?)

That Heinlein’s various visions of the future were contradictory did not occur to me.  I also was unable to distinguish between the ideas that Heinlein meant seriously and the ideas he was just throwing out for their own sake.

When I re-read the book in college, I had the feeling that my kindly uncle was something of a blowhard.  Now that I’m older, I’m finding the avuncular voice just the least bit condescending.

But I’m not merely older, I’ve been a professional writer for a long time— and now I can look at the book from the point of view of someone who’s written nearly as many books as Heinlein himself.

Firstly, the structure is very odd.  I can well believe, as biographer Patterson maintains, that it was written over more than ten years, with many diversions and false starts.  One has the sense that there were several manuscripts all cohabiting uneasily together.

And it’s a novel almost entirely without suspense!  It starts off well enough, with Martian Mike being smuggled out of government custody to the home of renegade lawyer Jubal Harshaw— but then the book just stops, to give Jubal the chance to make speeches and give us his opinions for 25,000 words or so.  Heinlein’s avuncular voice does very well with the speeches, and any single speech is entertaining, but there are so damned many of them!  I felt as if I were being repeatedly walloped with a hockey stick.

The story picks up again when the government stormtroopers start circling Jubal’s fort, but then it turns out that Mike the Martian has superpowers, and he effortlessly banishes the bad guys from our dimension.  (So much for suspense . . . ) And then Jubal works out a settlement with the government, and that ends any hope of suspense in the book, which nevertheless continues on for well over 100,000 words, mostly declamation.

(Heinlein’s original version of the book, now available, goes on for 60,000 more words than the edited version I re-read.  My God, more speeches!)

Things happen later that could be suspenseful— Mike’s church gets bombed by the Mafia, which could be an exciting scene— but we’re told right away that the bombing doesn’t matter, and that it’s all part of Mike’s plan, so everything is okay, no need to get excited, and so I wasn’t.

Heinlein gives us two protagonists who are, in essence, perfect human beings.  (So much for watching them grow and change.)  Neither Jubal nor Mike can think a wrong thought or perform a wrong action.  Their judgment is perfect and their actions even more so.  Mike’s knowledge of the human race is sub-perfect at the start, but once he finds out about sex and laughter (fortunately not at the same time) he demonstrates his eerie perfection for the rest of the book, and for the most part takes over Jubal’s job of giving speeches to the reader. (His speeches are less entertaining than Jubal’s, because they’re not delivered by Heinlein’s cranky-old-man persona, but rather by an earnest messiah delivering unto us mortals the Trvth.)

The perfection of the two protagonists leads to the side effect of everyone else in the book becoming their foils.  The rest of the cast have to ask the dumb questions, and make the dumb arguments, that allow Jubal and Mike to demonstrate their knowledge and mastery.  This is particularly true of Jill, Mike’s girlfriend, who is repeatedly saddled with irrational prejudices and arguments so that Jubal and Mike can knock them down and make her look dim.

I’m hardly the first to say that all the girls in the book are essentially interchangeable, and I’m not the first to note that while Heinlein tells us repeatedly that the women are intelligent and accomplished and competent, none of them appear that way when they actually appear in the narrative.  Their function is to sexually initiate Mike, and once that’s done, they go on having interchangeable sex with other interchangeable partners.

Heinlein of course practiced free love and nudism in real life, but as depicted here the polyamory is idealized and far more simple, I suspect, than it is in reality.  It’s True and Right, because one of the perfect protagonists says it is— just as, in Starship Troopers, a society that restricts the franchise to the military is True and Right, because a Professor of Moral Philosophy declaims it so.  No evidence is needed, just the word of someone Heinlein’s put in authority.

I found the last third of the book hard to get through, because it was endless speechifying.  I was eye-rolling and flipping through the pages as fast as I could.

And still . . . I have to say that this is a very remarkable book, particularly for one that was composed in the Eisenhower Administration.  Possibly all the arguments and declamations were necessary in order to convince Mr. Average Joe of 1960 to take any of the ideas seriously at all.

And I am left with no doubt that Heinlein reveals himself in many of the speeches— not just his opinions, of which there are many in the earlier works, but Heinlein’s inner self, what he actually believes and cares about.  Heinlein’s inner self is exploding out of the pages here, and it’s interesting when it happens, at least until it starts happening to excess.

In his later works that person got really tiresome, and I stopped reading well before Heinlein stopped writing.  Ranting Uncle Bob was spoiling my memory of Kindly Uncle Bob.

But still.  Stranger.  Wow.  Nothing like it.