The first novella--the eponymous "Fifth Head of Cerberus"--does an excellent job of laying down the bizarre background of the book. The narrator has the same faintly archaic style that Wolfe used to perfection in The Book of the New Sun, and here too that style effectively doles out the necessary exposition while still leaving room for mystery. But the story of the first novella gets gradually more and more bizarre--the narrator tells the story of himself as a young child in a disturbing house of adult pleasures, with a mysterious father who begins calling up both of his sons in the middle of the night for--among other things--electro-shock sessions. Gradually the young boy begins losing track of immense stretches of time--for instance, he wakes up one day six months after his last memory. And all this bizarreness takes place in a strange alien world, far away from earth, with a sister planet that orbits near it.
"The Fifth Head of Cerberus" is only linked to the other novellas by its setting and by the casual introduction of the central question of the book: what happened to the shape-shifting indigenous life-forms of the planet? There is some suspicion that "the abos" have survived. The second novella gives us further information about the abos. It is ostensibly a short story by a human scientist about what life must have been like for the abos--but I got the feeling that there should have been something more to it. Regardless, the story is interesting in itself--a strange and violent fairy tale, in many ways--but it failed to capture my interest as strongly as the first novella did.
The third novella is simply terrible. The action of the third novella consists of an officer on the alien planet picking up random documents to read in order to make a suggestion to a higher authority about what to do with a certain prisoner--the same scientist who penned the second novella, who was imprisoned after he made serious forays into the planet's wilderness to solve the mystery of the abos. This conceit makes the third novella confusingly disjointed--and because I expected the third novella to clear up some questions, its haphazard nature frustrated me to no end.
The third novella does have a pretty interesting twist that does seem to answer some questions--but then again, maybe it doesn't. Sigh.
In case you're wondering, no, there are no clear answers by the end (although I am sure that people have figured out the point of the whole thing by now). And, unlike in The Book of the New Sun, the story is not rich enough, the mysteries not deep enough, and the questions not complex enough to override the deep dissatisfaction that comes from a book with too few answers and too much unnecessary obfuscation.
NOTE: I might try re-reading this book at some point. People seem to really like it, and perhaps some mysteries will clear up upon a re-reading.
Copyright © 2002 Steven Wu 