Word: alnilam
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ALNILAM, James Dickey -- THE BOYS OF WINTER, Wilfrid Sheed -- 50, Avery Corman MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK, Saul Bellow POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE, Carrie Fisher -- YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS, Joyce Carol Oates...
...notion of 50 readers swinging in hammocks is hard to resist. At nearly 700 pages, Alnilam is a book for a long, hot summer. "I've tried to do for the air what Melville did for water," says Dickey with a laugh that deflects the seriousness of his novel. It is a euphonious mystery story set at a U.S. Army Air Corps training base during the 1940s. Flying, in the mechanical as well as transcendental sense, is basic to the action, which is surprisingly abundant for a book that is shaped by poetic impulses rather than plot...
...Alnilam's protagonist is Frank Cahill, an Atlanta amusement-park and swimming-pool owner who has recently been blinded by diabetes. He learns that his son Joel is missing and presumed dead after a military aircraft training accident in North Carolina. Cahill and his touchy German shepherd Zack travel to Peckover air base to learn more, even though father has never laid eyes on son. Cahill had been abandoned by his wife shortly before Joel was born, 19 years earlier...
...Cahill literally feels his way to the truth about his son. Joel's former instructor breaks regulations and takes him for a dangerous spin that conveys the elemental and unnatural sensation of flight. Cahill also discovers that the lost flyer was the leader of a trainee cult known as Alnilam, named after the central star in the constellation Orion, the hunter. Eventually Joel is revealed as an incipient fascist, a "cool-headed demon," an arrogant manipulator of symbols and, reminiscent of the pseudoscientific romanticism of Nazi Germany, a practitioner of "precision mysticism...
...Alnilam also contains impelling descriptions of aerial combat, though we learn later the stories are probably lies. Significantly, the accusation cannot lessen the imaginativeness of the narration. It is one of Dickey's better stunts: to portray the artist as an inspired liar who can convince us that boats float on grass and a book...