Strangers in a Strange Land

...Like sand washed up on a beach, the foreigners blend totally into their new environment, with only their instinct for self-preservation left to distinguish them from the natives...

...Buffeted about in this welter of antagonism, the five tourists are diverted in their course and rapidly adopt nihilistic methods to insure their own survival...

...But the imaginary journey in its most memorable appearances (Gulliver comes to mind) involves a first person narrator, and this, we can now understand, is probably a sensible practice...

...In Nihilon, individualism is carried to its furthest limit: Self-expression plus self-indulgence, runs the national motto, equals nihilism...

...Nobody can tell how these isolated perfect sections of road get here or why they were built," says one of the visitors, "but they seem to be a characteristic feature of the country...

...Reviewed by Andrew Bergman The imaginary voyage is a rich and seasoned tradition of satire in which the familiar is veiled as the astonishingly bizarre...

...For decorum's sake, though, the man and woman will wed shortly before the scheduled lift-off...

...But Sillitoe is better at making points than creating people...

...in fact, broadcasters of the Lies are among the country's greatest celebrities...

...As with general principles or formulas, Sillitoe's arid propositions about the modern world do not have the potency of affecting, particularized human experience...

...there is no Nihilon citizen, it seems, who does not want to kill someone badly enough to save sedulously for a certificate...

...That would never do...

...Travels in Nihilon is related in the third person-the reason given in the prologue is that the novel is a synthesis of the five researchers' reports...

...by discounting the ethics of each problem, and merely making a choice in the form of a gamble...

...To advertise its mendacity, the nation's news program is officially called "The Lies," but is no less popular for that...

...the other two (the woman and a poet) end up performing to perfection in space...

...Their incredible tractability, moreover, is exceeded by the convoluted implausibility of the plot: Three of the tourists ultimately become involved in a successful revolution to restore ex-President Took's forces of honesty, decency and order to power...

...Uncommonly well paved sections of highway end treacherously in sudden cliffs or swamps...

...Absolute freedom, preserved by the most comprehensive system of control, is possible only because human sympathy has been effectively extirpated...

...Such extraordinary virulence does not come easily, however...

...His dexterous distortions and artful constructions serve only his didacticism, and his novel, consequently, is a prolix and naggingly repetitive performance...

...In Travels in Nihilon, by Alan Sillitoe, author of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, four men and a woman, researching a tourist guidebook, journey to a bellicose and pernicious nation where "absolute chaos is meticulously regulated...

...There is much talk of a spaceflight that will feature an attractive young couple achieving an historic first by copulating in orbit while the world watches on TV...

...Since most of the capitalist freedom-loving nations are going in the same direction," the project's chief editor comments in a prologue, it is a place well worth studying...

...Disparateness is made a tool for derision...

...And like everything else in Nihilon, sexual permissiveness is extreme...

...His five main characters occasion incidents or observe them, yet scarcely live at all...

...Soon, the travelers are taking lives, shifting lovers and shedding ideologies along with everyone else...

...Nihilon's social programs are efficacious, if unusual...

...To dispose of citizens considered parasitic, the nation has its elderly fight frequent, televised battles with neighboring Cronacia...

...Love and nihilism don't go together," lectures a customs officer...

...Persuasion, under the circumstances, is not a result of the author's craft, but largely a matter of chance...

...The book takes a deadeningly long time to arrive, and when it does the reader departs Nihilon with as much eagerness as if he had been a visitor there himself...

...Most nihilists solved it...

...Each of the five originally entered Nihilon by a different route...

...The government has also adroitly solved the problem of a work incentive-something as necessary to the country's development as it is inimical to the spirit of the national philosophy-by selling Killing Certificates at very high prices...

...On Nihilon's roads, drunken driving is required and motorists must steer to kill...

...One of them observes: "The art of living under nihilism consisted in being able to make decisions of a fundamental nature every few hours instead of every ten years...

...Strange lands like Lilliput and Erewhon are invented for purposes of ridiculing the not-so-strange...

...Everything in the country is the exact inversion of conventional expectation...

...Theft is promoted as a fair means of reapportioning wealth, and victims, not criminals, are imprisoned...

...Its heavy metaphorical weight is balanced by a tone that is dispassionate and uncommitted, and a style that is restrained...

...Love is a threat to nihilism...

...From the frequency with which they stumble into, lose and find each other again, one might think they and a few others were the only people in the entire country...

...Honesty, stability, all those terrible things stem from love...

...If you allow love, you get idealism, cooperation, affection...

...The bodies pile up like flies on a headlamp...

...Thus they saved themselves from moral inanition, but only at the expense of the soul itself, a payment which nevertheless enabled them to go on living with a certain amount of spirit...

...It can be used by the opposition as a social force...