Dhalgren by Samuel R. DelanyMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
In Dhalgren, the town of Bellona is isolated. It's somewhere in the central United States, but we don't know exactly where. People live in a kind of chaotic anarchy, with no authorities present to enforce order. Occasionally strange things happen in the sky, but generally life continues with little interference from whatever has affected the town. The story follows the Kid, a wanderer who comes into town without knowing even his own name, but becomes part of the community.
Dhalgren is a very different kind of escapism than I usually look for in science fiction or fantasy. There's very little in the way of explaining why the world is the way it is, or how. Instead it's almost entirely about people finding ways to keep living their lives. Some go with the flow of things, some fight against it. Bellona is a place of benevolent anarchy, where everyone pretty much does whatever they like and things will largely just work out.
There are a lot of themes running through this book. Sex is a big one, present at the very beginning, and explicitly pornographic at times. Homosexuality, multiple partners, wide promiscuity - it reads to me as if Delaney was trying to touch on everything from the 1960s free love movement. Racial tensions appear as well, with some fairly bigoted characters as well as prominent black figures. Several characters, including the Kid, exhibit symptoms of mental illness. There's plenty of drug and alcohol use, sometimes to the point of abuse.
But it's just as interesting what doesn't appear. There are basically no economics - everyone just takes what they need from abandoned stores, squats in the park or abandoned homes, even drinks are free at the bar. There's no religion - the one church that we see is a community center but not a place for traditional worship, and the characters largely ignore the spiritual (at least in a religious context). And there's no government or other controlling authority, or any attempts to form one.
Taken together, the things that Delaney includes and chooses to leave out gives the impression of being unhappy with many realities of the world - living under authority, restrictions on sexual expression, economic hardships - and describing a world that simply removes them. I don't know if that's how Delaney felt himself, or it was a viewpoint he was trying to capture. I think it succeeds to some extent, although it's clearly not a stable reality. The reader can see that at some point, either resources will begin to run low or someone will get power-hungry, and the anarchy will turn much less benevolent. But that time doesn't come during the book.
All told, I can't say I particularly liked Dhalgren. It says some interesting things on quite a few topics, and that part I did enjoy. However, I just couldn't get behind the idea that you can take a random city full of people, remove the constraints mentioned above, and end up with a chaotic-but-largely-benign utopia of personal freedom and sexual expression. Someone or something has to make an effort to get that scenario and keep it going, and Dhalgren doesn't have any such controlling force. Without that, it feels like reading one long dream sequence rather than a commentary on reality, which is just not my thing.
