Silverlock has a terrific opening line: “If I had cared to live, I would have died.” A. Clarence Shandon didn’t panic and exhaust himself during a shipwreck. Being depressed, isolated, and indifferent to his own life (and others’ lives), he survived–and was rescued from the sea by a stranger, Golias. For literary types, there’s an instant reference here to Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom” and Melville’s Moby Dick, but Silverlock (as Golias quickly dubbed him), a Chicagoan who had majored in business administration at the University of Wisconsin, didn’t perceive anything particularly usual about these circumstances. Selfish and conceited, he quickly found himself in trouble on land (the island they swam to belonged to the enchantress Circe–if you know your classics, you can well imagine his fate), and was rescued yet again. The next island they fled to seemed very much like the one depicted in Robinson Crusoe…and so the adventures continued.

You get the idea–literally hundreds of characters and references from literature, history, myth, and folklore are to be found here, although Silverlock, throughout, accepts these strange happenings without any expression of surprise, or of recognition (which is, I think, meant to be a rather strong indictment of the twentieth century American educational system). There’s more than one way to read this book–you can play a spot-the-reference game and congratulate yourself on recognizing the allusions (with bonus points for the more obscure ones). Or you can just go along with Silverlock on a rolicking adventure (Vikings, cannibals, Robin Hood and his men, Don Quixote–you get the idea). Or, you can step back a bit from the surface silliness, and observe a lost soul’s development into a human being, complete with an epic journey through the underworld and beyond. Ultimately, the story is itself a celebration of storytelling–how it improves us, how important it is for living a fully-realized life.

You could say that the book is a bit of a rambling, gimmick-y mess. And you wouldn’t be wrong. You could also quite fairly criticize the paucity of female characters (although that’s rightly a criticism of the entire literary canon, as well as of the society of 1949). It’s hard to like Silverlock as a person–he’s detached, ungrateful, masculinist, boring, incurious, and alienated. He does improve, but, honestly, not nearly enough; this hero’s journey doesn’t end in heroism, just in basic decency and friendship finally reciprocated. Still, though, I enjoyed the romp through the Commonwealth of Letters–it was great fun to read and very, very clever.

It’s assuredly not for everyone, but for the right reader (and maybe that reader is you), Silverlock can be a fantastic voyage.  

***

NOVEL: Silverlock

AUTHOR: John Myers Myers

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 1949

LEAD-IN IMAGE

Book cover, Silverlock: Including the Silverlock Companion, published by NESFA Press