The Road to Corlay by Richard Cowper
202 pages
Published 1978 (includes "Piper at the Gates of Dawn," originally published 1976)
Read from November 7 to November 11
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
I'll forever remember this as the book I was reading when a spray-tanned reality TV clown, riding a wave of nativism and fascism throughout rural America, won the White House. Set a thousand years from now, in a feudal future after man-made climate change has melted the ice caps and Britain is flooded into a series of island kingdoms, where the Church Militant hunts the heretics who preach brotherly love and Universal Kinship, The Road to Corlay is also appallingly apropos to the events of Tuesday.
Corlay is a fixup of two novellas. "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" is a predictable but sweet little number, the ending of which was spoiled for me (majorly) by the back cover blurb. That blunted the ending's impact, to put it mildly, but I enjoyed the novella nonetheless. "The Road to Corlay" is longer, more ambitious, and also more muddled, getting sidetracked with what I would consider to be a very 1970s plotline: Near-future technobabble experimentation (sample: "From my experience I'd say that what takes place in the pineal zone of the human cortex is beyond the scope of our natural philosophies") sends an English scientist on an out-of-body experience inside the head of a religious fugitive in 3018 AD. It's all quite silly and detracts from whatever merit the rest of the story might have.
At this point I can't parse out my feelings: Was Corlay a middling effort, failing to live up to its setting and the initial promise of "Piper," or am I merely numb and nihilistic over the future we face?
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