Product Description

In the early days of World War II, a blind man sets off in search of the son he never knew, a charismatic Air Force pilot supposedly killed in a training accident. His odyssey leads to the secret heart of a "higher military"--sustained by heroism and a fanatical devotion to flight. By the author of Deliverance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1584352 in Books
• Published on: 1988-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 768 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Dickey's second novel, 17 years after the great success of Deliverance, is by no means such a clear winner. It is a massive, ambitious, flawed book with many passages of breathtaking grandeur in both the conception and the writing, but with a puzzling hollowness at its center and moments of of melodrama that seem to have been created with an action movie in mind. The story is slight for a book of these imposing dimensions, and is clearly only an excuse for Dickey to work out a series of often profound, sometimes merely glib ruminations on the mysteries of flight, the nature of war, male bonding, the mystique of leadership and, above all, the starkly contrasting worlds of vision and blindness. Frank Cahill, the rather hazily conceived protagonist, is a newly blind man who journeys with his faithful but ferocious dog Zack to a WW II Air Corps training base in North Carolina where his son Joel has just been reported killed in an accident. He has never seen Joel, having separated from his mother before his birth, but as he goes around the base talking to officers and his son's fellow cadets, a strange picture begins to emerge: of a brilliant, charismatic student who has amassed a cult following called Alnilam (named after a key star in celestial navigation). Alnilam, a group difficult to take seriously, offers him dark hints about Joel's death, and has this scheme . . . . But plot, as noted, is not the novel's strong point. Dickey always writes like the poet he is, and his evocations of the blind man's world of breath, air, sound and movement, of the mysteries of flight, of somber winter landscapes, are hallucinatory in their power. (One experiment, howeverthe running of Cahill's sensations and the visible world in parallel columns on the page at certain momentsis merely awkward.) The characters, except for the base commander, are seldom very convincing, but their talk is a haunting blend of eloquence and rough country speech. There are two harrowingly violent climaxes and a real Hollywood close. Alnilam is by no means an easy read, but for those who persevere there are the very real rewards of a vastly talented author extending himself and creating a world few writers could even imagine.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Pebble In A Pond
I'm aware that "Alnilam" didn't fare well on the popular market, and that three previous ..... reviewers have given this Dickey novel low ratings. But this novel engrossed me, and it has stayed with me for fourteen years now.
A dear English professor under whom I studied used the metaphor of a pebble in a pond to illustrate how interpreting the "meaning" of a fine literary work is essentially a subjective matter. The author drops a pebble into the center of a pond, as it were, and the ripples which it produces, which radiate out to the edges of the pond, are the meanings which we readers ascribe to his creation.
Thus with "Alnilam," I believe. Dickey's powerful prose and deep symbolisms allow a vast range of responses and interpretations. Mine include a lot of religious themes, although I'm aware that Dickey was a bomber pilot in WWII and thus the aviation references, not only explicit but implicit, may be more concretely referential than I've chosen to interpret them. I'm not particularly religious, but I don't know whether the spiritual metaphors I find in "Alnilam" are my own particular "ripple in the pond" or anything Dickey intended when he dropped his "pebble."
At any rate, this reader found "Alnilam" not only brilliantly written but profoundly moving. I'd give it five stars but for the fact that I can't claim to fully understand this novel on an intellectual or objective level, despite enjoying it and being deeply moved by it. But is intellectual grasp a necessary criterion of good literature? Particularly of the work of a brilliant poet? Being uncertain, I give it four stars.

768 pages of ponderously disappointing fiction
As a James Dickey fan, I was looking forward to immersing myself in Alnilam. The start was slow but optimistically I looked forward to something satisfying - I slogged through this disappointment until the bitter end. The one star I gave it (my first inclination was no stars for the pitiful plot and tedious narrative but that was not an option...) was only for some of the character development which was interesting at times. What a waste of a tree (well, with 768 pages, many trees).

Twenty Years Later
I read this book when it first came out and I was disappointed. But it has a weird way of lingering in the mind. Of all the books I have ever read, I have spent more time thinking about this one than any book other than "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"-- which it doesn't really resemble (well, it is about a father and a son, so I suppose it does resemble it). What was Dickey trying to accomplish? I wonder if I'll ever know. I really would like to do something, though. Someday I want to write the screenplay...I'm kidding. No I'm not. I want to make this book into a movie. FADE IN: Exterior-Night, in the clouds. Pink Floyd's "Learning to Fly" plays in the background. A strange, marionette-like flying machine resembling the Wright Bros. contraption drifts throught the clouds towards the camera. At the controls is a very young man wearing a stylized military uniform with a high peaked cap, the letters A L N I L A M appear behind the craft like giant water towers reflecting the searchlights, the fog rolls in to fill the frame and the camera pulls back to reveal the swirling fog transformed into the reflection in the lenses of the dark glasses of FRANK CAHILL...