Sean Gainford's Reviews > Mockingbird

Unfortunately Ends Up Just Being Average

This is the first time that for the first 80 pages of a book I couldn't put it down and then for the rest of the book it ends up being below average. At first it was so interesting, so bizarre. I was fascinated and entranced by this dystopia world and thought I had found another great author. But then it seems the author just ran out of steam. I actually thought to myself that Tevis is sabotaging his work on purpose. The characters started to become boring, there were pointless scenes, grammatical errors, and he even named one of his main characters incorrectly!

The message of the book is also a bit too academic and lacks subtlety:


Inwardness, privacy, self-fulfilment, drugs, pleasure, technology = bad. Reading, knowledge, friends, family = good.


I couldn't understand what Spofforth was about though. If the message of the book is that reading and knowledge and intellectual curiosity is a good thing, this definitely wasn't the case for Spofforth, who is more knowledgeable then anybody left on the planet, seems to appreciate beauty, but whose mind is always tired and who wants to die. So the message I was getting was what is the point of it all? Why not just snuff it?

I'm also not sure about the phrase that Paul keeps repeating throughout the book: `Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods'. Maybe arbitrarily saying such strange things is some kind of side effect of popping one too many sopor pills. I have no idea what it means and it is probably some line out of a bad poem. It is obvious that Paul doesn't know what it means either. But that is probably the point of it - you don't need to know what it means you just have to feel something when the phrase is said. It personally made me feel bored every time I heard it.

There were definitely some scenes in the book that were quite boring and should have really just been cut altogether. The whole encounter with the religious sexist commune was too mundane and contemporary actually. It seemed like something that you would still find in some small redneck southern town in America. Then Paul discussing parts out of the bible and analysing Jesus was just pointless and dull.

I think this book possibly could have been much better if the relationship between Mary Lou and Paul was developed more strongly, rather than just having Mary Lou become nonchalant about their relationship and Paul ending up being just a sad, whining character in love with a woman who doesn't care much about him.

Unfortunately I think the conversation Mary Lou has with Spofforth sums the book up:

`If no one gets born,' I said, `there won't be any more people on the earth.'
He was silent for a minute. Then he looked at me. `Do you care?' he said. `Do you really care?'
I looked back at him. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know if I did care.

And by the end of the book, the reader isn't really inspired to care either. Supposedly this book was written by Walter Tevis towards the end of his life and after he battled depression and alcoholism for many years. To me this book didn't convince me that Walter Tevis was leaving this world a man completely convinced that this world was worth saving. Maybe the character that best portrays Tevis is Spofforth. A man with great amount of knowledge and skill, who can appreciate beauty, but still can never overcome his sadness he has. Who knows.

I'll still give this book three stars, because there was some really good ideas in it and because this book is definitely going to bring some type of response from the reader. I doubt that anybody can read this book and just be nonchalant about it. It is just disappointing though because it could have been great, and could really have been a SF Masterwork.