I don’t particularly like Zelazny in the first place, but I did like some of his works. The Amber Series, for example -- fairly amusing, with that crazy royal family and their relationships – more absurdly complicated relationships than in a soap opera. And A Night in the Lonesome October was funny, too. But The Dream Master was boring and stupid, quite possibly one of the stupidest books that I’ve ever read.
The plot is simple enough. The story is settled in not so far future, 21st century (I know, it’s not future anymore, but it was in 1966, when the book was written). The main character, Charles Rander, is a neuroparticipant, a special kind of shrink. Or a Dream Master, if you prefer. With help of a machine, ONT/R (I forgot what the abbreviation was for, I remember it was supposed to sound scientific), he’s able to enter into his patient’s dreams and to direct them, thus better understanding them and curing them with more success than any other shrink. And of all the Dream Masters, he’s the best. Though he wouldn’t say it in public, he thinks of himself as of a god; it would destroy him if someone better appeared.
The good doctor accepts a challenge. A beautiful young woman, Ilene Shallot, comes into his life, a psychiatrist who asks him to teach her to become a Dream Master too. The problem is, she’s blind. Though Rander can not make her see in the real world, he can teach her to see in dreams, and the sessions begin. Rander soon realizes that her will is very strong, often overpowering his own, which is something he doesn’t like at all. But he is determined to succeed in something no one has done before, in something than no one has thought was possible under any conditions. The end is predictable: after he learns that her will is too strong for him to overpower, he goes insane and becomes a patient of another Dream Master. We don’t get to find out whatever happened to the blind woman.
The predictability is not a problem. This is the same old story of a pupil besting, defeating and destroying her teacher, so I knew from the start that something bad would inevitably happen to the main character. The worst thing in this novel is Zelazny’s attitude, something like "I’ve read all these books and you didn’t, so you can just drop dead". That attitude resulted in a cacophony of Buddhism, Scandinavian mythology, Walt Whitman, Greek mythology, Kabbalah, Arthurian legends... There was no reason for all of it to be in this short novel (200+ pages), except for the author to be showing off. Potentially good story was literally buried under stuff that only served to convince us that Zelazny was an educated man. Big deal. He should’ve written an encyclopedia.
What The Dream Master also lacks are likable characters. Charles Rander is too full of himself, just like his creator. The blind psychiatrist would go over dead bodies (the Dream Master she had sessions with before she met Rander committed suicide) and push people into madness to get what she wants. Rander’s ten-year-old son, Peter, speaks as if he was fifty. The blind woman’s mutated dog, Sigmund, is a pitiful creature, neither really a dog nor, of course, a human, but he wasn’t given enough space that a reader might sympathize with him. The only at least partially likable character was Rander’s old teacher, professor Bartelmetz, but his part was short.
There were some parts of the book that I liked – the ones written from the dogs’ point of view. These dogs were created, both through genetic engineering and surgery, to be capable to understand human speech and even to speak a little (they know about 400 words). They dislike ordinary dogs who look like them, but neither speak nor understand speech, except for simple stuff like "bad dog!’. There are very few of these mutated dogs, so they never get to meet with each other. They are very loyal to their human masters; they are also the loneliest creatures on Earth, never meeting another creature that is completely like them. So the parts of the book which were written from their point of view were rather interesting, and well-written too, showing how confused and torn apart they felt. These parts were few and short, alas.
Overall, The Dream Master is a tiresome book with a good plot buried under author’s unnecessary showing off. Don’t waste your time and money on it.
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