Number 31 - The Unreasoning Mask - Philip Jose Farmer

 I'm not sure where to begin on this one.

Farmer is a writer I obsessed on in my teens and early 20s and managed to collect more than 40 of his books.  This is one I didn't get around to reading all those years ago, and it has to be said that it has an amazing cover. 

Sadly however, the cover is the best thing about this book by a considerable distance. Other than the  opening line - "The Bolg kills all but one!" 

That does at least grab the interest quite effectively.

There's a lot of imagination on show in the book, as per usual for Farmer.  However it doesn't translate into a hugely enjoyable read.

The situation we're in at the beginning is extremely alien and requires a lot of infodump to bring about any clarity. The central character isn't particularly sympathetic or interesting. 

We know he has been compelled to steal an icon from a temple on an alien world.  The icon is the egg shaped item on that gorgeous cover. It's called the Glyfa (the easiest of the alien names to pronounce in the book) and is sentient and arranged for Ramstan (our hero) to kidnap it. And who is the green robed figure Ramstan keeps seeing? 

What follows next is an exciting chase through assorted layers of technobabble and extreme philosophising on religion and the nature of the pluriverse as they try to avoid the aliens whose god they've stolen.  They also encounter the Bolg from the opening line - a supergiant thing/being that burns and destroys any planet with sentient life.

There are occasional flashes of greatness that reminded me of why I used to love his books. One chapter in particular where Ramstan does nothing but descend in a launch past layers of a 2km tall tree and witnesses all the different species is described so well you can almost see it.  The atmosphere he creates in that chapter is how the whole book should have felt. 

Sadly, he fails to do that.  We spend the first few chapters entirely confused about what's happening. It settles down to something we can follow, but then we get a full 3 chapters of infodump near the end to explain what the Bolg actually is, and soon after we get the worst ending on any book I've read since I started this blog.  

I wanted to love it. Farmer was an old literary obsession after all, and that cover... but he was always in all honesty a little bit hit and miss.  This is a definite miss.