angle sent to help humanity destroy itself

Sympathique exercice de style où l'ange veut la perte de l'humanité... A lire avec bienveillance. ( )

I used to be a big fan of Westlake's Dortmunder series so I went through a period of reading whatever else of his work that came to hand. Some were great and some were like "Humans", although none quite so bad.

God decides to destroy Earth and gets some Angel to do the dirty work for him. The Angel recruits a bunch of humans, including an AIDS infected African prostitute and a Russian gag writer to take over a nuclear power plant and ... well, destroy the world. Of course, Satan wants nothing of this and sends his own representative to stop them and keep the human race chugging along. This could have been a much better story but it compares poorly with the Dortmunder series. ( )

When Donald Westlake died recently it was a grim day here at Snarl Towers. I think it is no secret that he's been one of my favourite authors since my teens. As with so many of the authors whose work I like the best, I eventually learned to space the books out a bit, with the result that now I still have a fair number left to go -- hurrah. This one I picked up a few months ago when we visited the NJ town of Montclair so that Pam could go and spend money relentlessly in some fabric/yarn store while I did my very best not to spend anything at all in the Montclair Book Center, one of my rave-fave bookstores. (It's kind of like a smaller version of the Strand in NYC.) I came away having spent hardly anything at all -- well, significantly less than Pam had in the shop down the road.

Westlake played with fantasy and science fiction from time to time during his long career, and in When Donald Westlake died recently it was a grim day here at Snarl Towers. I think it is no secret that he's been one of my favourite authors since my teens. As with so many of the authors whose work I like the best, I eventually learned to space the books out a bit, with the result that now I still have a fair number left to go -- hurrah. This one I picked up a few months ago when we visited the NJ town of Montclair so that Pam could go and spend money relentlessly in some fabric/yarn store while I did my very best not to spend anything at all in the Montclair Book Center, one of my best loved bookstores. (It's kind of like a smaller version of the Strand in NYC.) I came away having spent hardly anything at all -- well, significantly less than Pam had in the shop down the road.

Westlake played with fantasy and science fiction from time to time during his long career, and in Humans he mixed the two genres. God has become fed up with the pageant of folly that is human behaviour and sends an angel to earth to set things up such that human beings themselves will bring the world -- and perhaps the universe -- to an end. This the angel arranges in somewhat byzantine fashion by gathering together a motley crew of misfits, three of whom are in the last stages of terminal illness, and sending them to take over a nuclear plant. But this is no ordinary nuclear plant: within its precinct is the laboratory of a scientist attempting to bring into our universe a sample of "strange matter" -- stuff from another reality. If strange matter can be tamed, humanity will have a cheap, clean and copious source of energy forever. But if strange matter proves to be untamable, the merest jolt of his sample will spell curtains for us all.

As always with Westlake, what's actually a far more complex plot than I've outlined is set up impeccably (indeed one could complain he devotes too much of the early part of the book to this) and carried through with equal skill in timing and execution. The sole area in which the maestro's touch seems a trifle uncertain concerns a plot-strand in which Lucifer, who's perfectly content with the human race the way it is, sends an emissary to counter the efforts of the exterminating angel. While there are some enjoyable contretemps between the two shapeshifting entities, somehow the strand seems just to peter out through lack of auctorial interest rather than be woven in with everything else as the book comes to its climax.

There are some nice in-jokes for readers of disaster novels. I liked the occasional habit of introducing a character who's fully fleshed out for a chapter only for the clearly anticipated fate of being spifflicated at chapter's end.

In his dedication Westlake says the notion for the book was sparked off in conversation with Evan Hunter/Ed McBain -- another masterful crime writer who dabbled in f/sf and another member of my personal literary pantheon who died not so long ago. This added to the bittersweetness with which I read Humans.
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I wanted to like this -- I like Westlake's Dortmunder books, and I loved _Good Omens_, so something by Westlake with a Good Omens-style theme (God has an Ineffable Plan to end the world, but the other side has become rather fond of humanity and tries to thwart it) seemed like my kind of thing. Sadly, this was was bitter and nasty, and I couldn't finish it. ( )