Reviewing A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn
I Needed This
Edgar Pangborn: you would think more people might remember him on account of having such a weird name, but he is a now-little-known mid-century science fiction author. To the degree that anyone knows him, he is known for the pastoral themes of his writing, his at-times overly sentimental tenderness, and his love of music. It’s fairly pointless to speculate on the sexuality of someone who died a long time ago and whom we know little about, but I will say you can easily discern a certain outsider perspective and homoerotic atmosphere in his work if it pleases you.
A while back I read Pangborn’s Davy, which I happily own in the psychedelical hardcover reissue done by Old Earth Books. I deeply enjoyed it. It’s one of a very few 20th-century science fiction novels where the protagonist’s failure to completely apprehend the humanity of his female love interest had a meaningful impact on the story, rather than being taken as a given. I doubt this is intentional on Pangborn’s part, let’s not give a man from the 1920s too much credit, but it made Davy stand apart from other sci-fi novels of the era. Davy, while extremely horny, does not read like the foamy-mouthed rantings of a thrice-divorced libertarian who lives in a junkyard.
Davy is a strange, hilarious, and heartwrenching book, but this article is not intended to review Davy. Check out Joachim Boaz’s review if you wish to hear more on it.
This here is a review of Pangborn’s earlier book, A Mirror for Observers.
A Mirror for Observers (AMfO) came out about ten years before Davy. It’s not as powerfully composed or as complete of a character study as the later book. From accustomed as the modern reader is to troped-out and regimentally-plotted genre fiction, they will likely find that AMfO rambles shambolically over several strange acts. It is a distinctive work. It does get sentimental, as is Pangborn’s wont, but the sentiment has a point. Also, these days I’ll take a bit of sentiment. I could use a little more tenderness than God’s giving me right now.
I suspect AMfO did not make a great deal of sense to readers in 1954, saturated in soft-handed peacenik sentiments and implicit Socratic homoeroticism as it is. But it makes sense to me now.
It’s About What?
Martians live in hiding on Earth and have done so for millennia, ever since the ecological collapse of their home planet. Some of them go out into human society as Observers to study humanity and encourage our development into an enlightened species which can peacefully absorb the displaced Martians. But some Martians grow cynical and hateful by observing humanity’s crimes, becoming Abdicators who try and lure humanity into destroying itself. So far, so morality play.
In the futuristic year of 1963, Elmis, an Observer and the book’s narrator, competes with Namir, an Abdicator, to win the loyalty of a kid named Angelo Pontevecchio, who lives humbly outside Boston with his widowed mother. Angelo’s notably smart, though he has one partially disabled leg which alienates him a bit from other children. Both Namir and Elmis are convinced Angelo is a pivot point for humanity. Here Elmis also meets Angelo’s closest friend, a child musical prodigy named Sharon, who is agonizingly cute (your mileage will vary whether that agony is productive or not). This sequence of the narrative is a strange mixture of gentle 1950s slice-of-life adventures and alien rivals dueling psychologically. Elmis, in the guise of a kindly old man, befriends Angelo and Sharon so he can teach them the value of life and art, beauty and nature. Meanwhile, Namir sends a minion to convince Angelo to join an extremely-’50s street gang. Small disaster, promulgated by Namir, eventually drives Elmis, Sharon, and Angelo apart.
The second part of the book finds Elmis in New York City years later, where he reconnects with Sharon on the cusp of her piano career taking off. The two of them discover Angelo, also in the city under a new identity, and find he’s fallen in with a far-right nationalist party whose leader is of course Namir’s puppet. Though Elmis and Sharon convince Angelo to cut ties with the fascists, Namir engineers another disaster: a worldwide respiratory pandemic. Elmis, Angelo, and Sharon try to help people, and stay safe.
That is a baffling sort-of plot, I agree. You will not likely predict where it’s going before it’s too late. It’s perhaps unfair to depict it as “going somewhere” at all. It’s not a plot-driven book. It’s a philoso-emotional book. To enjoy AMfO, you need to want to read an alien’s musing on the terrible and beautiful eccentricities of human nature.
Next week: what do the musings of that alien amount to? Anything of import to how we live today? With mid-century science fiction, it’s not likely, but then again you never know.
(Obviously, I know.)
