Word: sunlights
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...Sunlight Dialogues evolves from the return of a once-prominent local lawyer to 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...
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...
Here lies the problem. The Sunlight Man also offers a singular viewpoint, based like Agathon and Grendel on a belief in a "cosmic order...indifferent to man." But where Agathon, Grendel, and their stories become complete in themselves, exclusive of and only supplemented by other devices, the Sunlight Man is lost in the shuffle of overburdening plot and structure complexities that never really hold their...
...Sunlight Dialogues were less of an object, with cumbersome physical structures, and more of an ongoing experience in which the reader could become involved, it would fare much better. But it isn't and it doesn't. It fails, and there's much better reading to be had. Some of it's by Gardner himself; that makes it even harder to say Dialogues isn't worth the time. Or as one of the novel's characters put it: "She realized, briefly, that she was merely a character in an endless, meaningless novel, then forgot...