Alnilam

I read this book when it first came out and I was disappointed. But it has a weird way of lingering in the mind. Of all the books I have ever read, I have spent more time thinking about this one than any book other than "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"-- which it doesn't really resemble (well, it is about a father and a son, so I suppose it does resemble it). What was Dickey trying to accomplish? I wonder if I'll ever know. I really would like to do something, though. Someday I want to write the screenplay...I'm kidding. No I'm not. I want to make this book into a movie. FADE IN: Exterior-Night, in the clouds. Pink Floyd's "Learning to Fly" plays in the background. A strange, marionette-like flying machine resembling the Wright Bros. contraption drifts throught the clouds towards the camera. At the controls is a very young man wearing a stylized military uniform with a high peaked cap, the letters A L N I L A M appear behind the craft like giant water towers reflecting the searchlights, the fog rolls in to fill the frame and the camera pulls back to reveal the swirling fog transformed into the reflection in the lenses of the dark glasses of FRANK CAHILL...

Anyone expecting another book like Deliverance will be vastly disappointed. I struggled with this book at first yet I found it had many rewards not offered up by the usual "top ten" hits list of today's pop pulp market. While Dickey fails where someone like Umberto Eco might succeed it is worthwhile to hitch a ride on Dickey's powerful imagination and tough muscular illusory prose. You almost believe a blind man can fly! I'm a sucker for Dickey so became immersed in this book and liked it better than the White Sea which came later and which I found a good cure for insomnia. While Alnilam did not initially "knock me out", I find it staying with me all these years later.

I'm aware that "Alnilam" didn't fare well on the popular market, and that three previous ..... reviewers have given this Dickey novel low ratings. But this novel engrossed me, and it has stayed with me for fourteen years now. A dear English professor under whom I studied used the metaphor of a pebble in a pond to illustrate how interpreting the "meaning" of a fine literary work is essentially a subjective matter. The author drops a pebble into the center of a pond, as it were, and the ripples which it produces, which radiate out to the edges of the pond, are the meanings which we readers ascribe to his creation. Thus with "Alnilam," I believe. Dickey's powerful prose and deep symbolisms allow a vast range of responses and interpretations. Mine include a lot of religious themes, although I'm aware that Dickey was a bomber pilot in WWII and thus the aviation references, not only explicit but implicit, may be more concretely referential than I've chosen to interpret them. I'm not particularly religious, but I don't know whether the spiritual metaphors I find in "Alnilam" are my own particular "ripple in the pond" or anything Dickey intended when he dropped his "pebble." At any rate, this reader found "Alnilam" not only brilliantly written but profoundly moving. I'd give it five stars but for the fact that I can't claim to fully understand this novel on an intellectual or objective level, despite enjoying it and being deeply moved by it. But is intellectual grasp a necessary criterion of good literature? Particularly of the work of a brilliant poet? Being uncertain, I give it four stars.