Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...adolescent mafioso would-be's and syphilitic has-beens--can take a bus going to Batavia Downs to "maybe someday hit it big." Batavia isn't known for much else--it certainly isn't a very likely setting for a novel with the high aspirations of John Gardner's The Sunlight Dialogues. But poor Batavia is not as much to blame as John Gardner...
...Batavia; self-exiled because of personal and financial disasters. No longer quite sane, Taggart Hodge assumes the pseudonym of the "Sunlight Man," a mystic, magician and aspiring philosopher king. Much of the story takes the shape of a thriller, replete with jail-break, murder, appearances and disappearances. But Medievalist Gardner doesn't stop here. The secretive dialogues of Hodge, an elusive and outspoken anarchist, with Batavia's strict law-and-order police chief (hence the title) are strangely reminiscent of Grendel's talks with Unferth in Grendel...
...Beowulf epic has once again risen from its grave; but even the Christians knew better than to resurrect the dead more than once. Still not content, Gardner spices his novel with allusions to Arthurian legend. And to all this he adds his own version of that classic Faulknerian tale of the decay of the proud and respected Compson family. It is all done in the same battered, albeit rigid, multi-consciousness point of view...
Perhaps some perspective will help. John Gardner's two previous novels set out on much the same course as The Sunlight Dialogues: In The Wreckage of Agathon, an old, muddled Athenian seer is imprisoned in Sparta for aiding the Helot rebellion. Using this one dominating character, set apart from the world, Gardner waxes and wanes between the philosophical and the lewd, providing an overview that is at once serious and hilarious. Again, in Grendel, the monster's ability to stand back and look at man from a unique perspective makes the novel both exciting and valuable reading. This remains true...
...SUNLIGHT DIALOGUES is harder to deal with. The Sunlight Man like Agathon, chooses freedom. And Gardner chooses neither the individual nor society for the victor; instead, he selects meaninglessness. It's one thing to accept a well written novel that opts for the absurdity of it all, but it's quite another thing if that kind of work must be buttressed by insignificant novelistic devices. Gardner loses his credibility...