The 1998 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel went to The Physiognomy (Avon Books) by Jeffrey Ford, a fascinating tale set in a world that is at once strange and eerily familiar. In the Well-Built City, Physiognomy, the science of determining character and intelligence by careful measurement of facial and bodily features, is a tool of judgement, used generally to determine individual worth, and specifically to determine guilt or innocence in crimes, even crimes that have not yet occurred.

When the Physiognomist Cley is sent out of the city to a distant village in order to investigate the theft of a miraculous fruit, he does not know that his belief in this science will be challenged and his life turned upside down by the experience.

Cley is despicable. At best, he is arrogant and rude. At worst, he is drug-addicted, abusive and a rapist. We cannot wait for him to fall from his lofty perch, and fall he surely does. When the examination of a mysterious corpse leads to the temporary loss of his Physiognomial prowess, he must depend upon a woman for whom he holds both loathing and lust to complete the investigation. He takes revenge upon her by attempting to "fix" her imperfect moral state by surgically rearranging her facial features. The result is a horror of such proportions that merely looking upon her face causes instant, violent death.

Cley's descent is far from over. Having failed in his mission to locate the fruit, he is sent to the sulphur mines by Drachton Below, the mad genius behind the coral spires and crystal domes of the Well-Built City, where he will labor until he literally burns to a crisp. Beset with physical and mental tortures, Cley experiences a hallucinatory expedition to the Earthly Paradise and begins to see the wrongness of his ways. All that remains for his redemption is to return to the Well-Built City and rescue from Below the woman he destroyed.

The novel is a compelling combination of action, intrigue and philosophy. Ford manages to paint a complex and rich world with a brevity of words, leaving much room within the 218 pages for the story to unfold quickly and dramatically. From the first paragraph, the reader is drawn into this world where magic and science intertwine with the grotesque and the sublime. The first-person narration (by Cley himself) is gripping, and the reader's mind won't wander for a moment, for fear of missing some crucial element of the tale. Not a single word is wasted. While a perfectly gratifying novel the first time through, The Physiognomy invites multiple readings for a full understanding of the subtle nuances at work in this novel.



Recommended: Yes