Alex Lella's Blog

The Face of the Enemy

It took a while, but I have finally read The Face of the Enemy by Thomas Wilson. One reason it took me s long is that William Atheling--James Blish was quite right about it being overwritten.

The story has almost two plots. It deals with a spaceship from Earth landing on a seemingly Utopian planet called Kellane. While there, one of the crew--the chaplain of all things--turns up dead presumably having committed suicide because of some religious issue with the Kel culture. The Captain, Brazil, investigates and this story is more like a detective story. But Brazil is also in love with a member of the Kel race and that leads to all sorts of complications.

Atheling mentions that the story is overwritten and even goes so far to make an interesting specific observation that the story uses bad metaphors. A bad metaphor is one where the author compares something concrete to something abstract. For example, "She was first love, last love.. . ." Atheling adds that you know this is bad because if it were a simile, you would immediately see the problem. "She was like first love and last love" sounds silly. A good metaphor is one where the author compares abstract things to concrete things. for example when Shakespeare said that "love is a red rose.. ." I never thought of metaphor this way and it's an intriguing observation.

Anyway, something Atheling doesn't mention is that this purple prose makes the character Brazil in particular seem like kind of a whiny hero because the story is more or less from his point of view, so it's hard to take him seriously.

That said, I don't hate this story as much as Atheling did. I doubt that I'll ever hate a story as much as Atheling. I'm just too nice a person if I do say so myself, but one thing that I did like about the story is the revelation about why Kel is such a happy planet and the philosophical ambiguity of that., but it was a hard read to get there.