Healer

I don't usually blog about books I am rereading, given the amount of it I do.  But I'll make an exception for Healer (Doubleday, 1976; first part originally published in Analog, 1972).  I believe this was Wilson's very first novel; he's since gone on to a lively career writing SF, horror, and thrillers.

I first read Healer in the very early 1980s, and got my copy personalized, probably at a Lunacon, by Wilson in 1984.  There was a second book set in the same universe published in 1979, which I didn't care for as much, and apparently a third as well that I never read.  But Healer was one of my early SF favorites, and it still holds up thirty years later.

It's a thin book by today's standards: only 183 pages.  And it's cursed with one of those truly awful 1970s Doubleday covers, this one of a man's head with the skin removed to expose the muscles, though the hair, oddly, still seems to be in place.  Someday someone will explain to me what Doubleday was thinking with this sort of thing.  It's not relevant to the story itself.

The premise of Healer is that in caves on a certain planet live colonies of alarets, small alien lifeforms that drop onto people's heads and, in some unexplained way, kill nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand of them.  Healer concerns Steven Dalt, the one in a thousand who survives the experience only to find himself sharing his consciousness with an opinionated alien personality with conscious control all the way down to the cellular level.  Among other benefits, this means effective immortality, since the alien known as Pard (short for "partner") can reverse age-related decay and maintain perfect health for its host-body, and a degree of psionic power that enables Dalt and Pard to reach into the minds of those suffering from a mysterious outbreak of abrupt catatonia called the horrors and bring them back to reality.  This talent inspires both messianic worship and political maneuvering set against the backdrop of a decaying interstellar federation.

It's not hard to see why this grabbed me as a preteen.  The problem of immortality and the alienation from humanity suffered by someone who outlives everyone he or she knows and cares for has been addressed in many works of fiction; it's part of the charm of vampire novels.  And it plays directly into adolescent alienation: Dalt is special, but no one knows, and no one understands him.  Wilson does not belabor the point -- he hardly has the space -- but Dalt's experiences with lovers Jean and El are precisely and painfully targeted to this issue, and Dalt's growing alienation from humanity over the centuries is convincing.

Wilson is an unabashed libertarian, and I suspect this novel helped foster my own libertarian streak.  Immigrating after a couple of centuries to the anarchist-libertarian planet Tolive, Dalt encounters a culture based on a combination of personal freedom (both drug use and suicide are legal and accepted) and free-market economics (private toll roads).  Wilson's case for Tolive's system is persuasive, but he slides it neatly into the story and moves briskly on without bogging the plot down in politics.  Those come later, when the interplanetary Federation founded by the Tolivian Peter LaNague begins to collapse not in political gridlock but in indifference, as the member planets ignore their loose central government and drift into an isolationism that mirrors Dalt's own.  Heading each part of the book are brief excerpts from a fictional biography of the Healer that provide background and chronology for each segment as Wilson jumps across the centuries of Dalt's life.

Healer is a case study in telling a tale with a kind of elegant spareness that covers all the major plot and characterization points without drowning the reader in hundreds of pages of development.  It's an utterly complete story without a wasted word anywhere.  Thirty years ago all I knew was that I loved it.  I reread it now with an adult understanding of and appreciation for the value of such clean, uncluttered storytelling.

Fortunately, it's available in reprint.  Read for yourself:

Comments

[Marilee J. Layman]

I've read others of his, but not this one. It doesn't sound like I'd like it.

[James Davis Nicoll]

I have very fond memories of Healer.

One element I appreciate is that unlike many libertarian authors, Wilson doesn't have it overwhelm the setting through sheer awesomeness. In fact, even though the found of the League was libertarian, only one world converts to his way of thinking.

[Serge]

It's a thin book by today's standards: only 183 pages (...) It's an utterly complete story without a wasted word anywhere.

My wife says that publishers are stepping away from doorstop tomes and back to slimmer books, presumably because of the cost of paper. Sure enough, her last's manuscript was required to be shorter, and, had the publisher not used a larger font(1), it'd have been quite thinner.

Ever since I've been reading Asimov's regularly, I've noticed that today's novellas(2) tend to be bloated tales that should have been shorter, but when I come across a novella that is a miniature novel, it's a wonderful experience.

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(1) That seems like a contradiction. It may be that they think a reader will feel she/his is getting more of her/his money's worth with a bgiiger book than with short and cheaper book.

(2) aka yesterday's novels.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Serge,
I always had a preference for longer books because I read fairly fast and as teenager (reading adult novels) with more free time, I was regularly burning through three novels a day. Twenty library books a week, which was the most they would let me check out at once. So I went twice a week.

Long books could be enjoyed for longer. I liked trilogies for the same reason: they could occupy me for an entire evening.

Nowadays, I think there are a lot of horrendously padded books out there, most of which are not so fabulous on the worldbuilding side as to justify the strain the length places on plotting. And I have a lot less reading time, which I am less starved to fill, so I can really appreciate the virtues of a good short novel.

[Serge]

And I have a lot less reading time, which I am less starved to fill

Out of curiosity, has the rate of your fiction acquisitions decreased accordingly? If not, you'll be needing a TARDIS library soon. Speaking of which, at the local SF club's meeting, they were talking about the collection of the late Jack Speer, an old-time fan who was a correspondant of Bradbury: some of them had recently looked at his collection and said there was no way all those books could fit into what from the outside was too small a room.

[Serge]

Speaking of book lovers.... Robert de Niro's nickname as a kid was 'Bobby Milk' because of his paleness, which itself came from his by far preferring spending time indoors with books.