(Review by Nick Gevers, Ph.D., Cape Town, South Africa.)

Ports of Call (1998), Jack Vance’s sixteenth Gaean Reach novel, has a twilight air to it. This is not because of the book’s tone; Ports of Call is spry and mischievous in mood, Vance’s first comic picaresque since Rhialto the Marvellous (1984). The twilight is, rather, that of Vance’s career: now in his eighties, he seems to have lost textual control, rambling merrily along towards no distinguishable goal. Vance has always been disinclined to take plot altogether seriously, showing more interest in rich physical description and in opportunities for clever Wodehousian dialogue; but Ports of Call is his first novel in which plot has collapsed completely. The result is something akin to a curious traveller’s journal: fascinating in parts, but constituting no coherent whole.

For its first quarter, Ports of Call seems essentially a repetition of Vance’s 1965 novel, Space Opera; again, a young man of no definite talents accompanies his vain and domineering aunt on a quixotic mission to far worlds, in this case to visit a fabled fountain of youth. P. G. Wodehouse presides: Myron Tany is Jeeves and Wooster in one, and social comedy proceeds, wittily but predictably. Abruptly, Myron is abandoned by his aunt on a backwater world; the text now veers away from its first quest, into indefinite roguery, as Myron joins the crew of an interstellar tramp freighter, which takes him from one exotic destination to another. Whenever a new objective swings into view around which the novel might structure itself, it is cursorily explored and quickly left behind. And so we read an aimless tapestry of incident. What is more, Vance, who prior to the 1980s tended to employ only one viewpoint character in any novel, now shifts freely between numerous different ones, so that Myron, the ostensible protagonist, is at times forgotten while a hitherto minor figure is quite suddenly foregrounded. This adds to a puzzling narrative fragmentation. Ports of Call functions, then, as a cycle of connected anecdotes, many of which within their brief and separate compass show Vance still very near the height of his powers. Wandering the starlanes, Myron and his crewmates encounter some superbly crafted wonders, often in juxtaposition with satirically conceived exotic social mores. There are courts which sit in taverns the better to curtail at once any breach of the peace; there are barbarians who conduct an insane trade in tanned human hides; there are ancient decayed cultures sinisterly resentful of archaeological intrusion; there are religious pilgrims who are compulsive gamblers, open to comic predation by swindlers and cardsharps. In the sly, picturesque, sometimes burlesque manner he has perfected over half a century, Vance adds more footnotes to his mandarin future history; unfortunately, these don’t make up a novel.

There may be a reason other than failing ability for this lapse. Conceivably, Vance, who spent part of the 1940s in the American Merchant Marine and who has been a restless traveller ever since, wished in Ports of Call to convey an existential truth about wanderlust: that when you set off down foreign roads there is no structure to what you do; that experiences come randomly, that places – ports of call – are unique, separate, fragments of life’s puzzle, to be assembled into any sort of whole long after they are physically encountered. In any event, Ports of Call ends with all quests and aspirations yet to be resolved; perhaps its forthcoming sequel, Lurulu, will lend some instructive hindsight, will allow this disappointing work some retrospective integration.

TOR (USA). 1998. HARDCOVER.