The Hollow Man
by Dan Simmons
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Book Summary Information
Author: Dan SimmonsEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1993-09-01
ISBN: 0553563505
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Spectra
Book Reviews of The Hollow Man
Book Review: The five stages of coping, with calculus
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the poignancies involved in losing a partner is the sudden removal of perhaps the one person that knew you completely, the person you didn't have to constantly explain yourself to, the person who knew exactly what you liked and disliked, who knew what you were thinking in the moments when you barely knew yourself. It's a bridge we construct over a long period of time, letting another person in, deciding how much of ourselves to reveal to them, and ultimately revealing everything we can, because we want them to know us as intimately as humanly possible. The loss of a person like that, who most people only meet once in their lifetimes if they're lucky, is staggering. It's like losing a part of yourself that kept all the best pieces of you inside themselves, and had a code to unlock the rest.
It's bad enough for us normal people. Now imagine you're both telepathic.
Jeremy Bremen and his wife Gail are both telepathic and thus shared an unprecedented level of closeness and communication, able to achieve an intimacy that most people couldn't even fathom. There was no one else in the world like either of them and through their ability they were able to share their deepest impressions and thoughts and feelings, instantly, no matter what the distance. It was wonderful. It was perfect.
Then she dies.
The loss of his beloved wife is bad enough for Jeremy but it's what follows the loss that threatens to unravel him completely. You see, without his wife around to help shield him, he's open to every thought from every person near him. Imagine a radio that plays every single frequency, at the same time. Now imagine that radio is your head. You see Jeremy's problem. Half-crazed and grieving, he flees across the country on a path to nowhere, desperate for a solution, when the only solution is to bring his wife back to life. And that's not going to happen.
In a way this novel is a flipside to Robert Silverberg's "Dying Inside". In that (highly recommended) novel, his protagonist used his telepathic ability to shortcut having to actually deal with people and was aghast at losing it because it meant he had actually had to talk to all of humanity. Here, the telepathic bond adds only greater closeness and intimacy and the loss of that connection is what nearly ruins Jeremy. He can't deal with it because it's worse than the loss of an organ, it's an open artery that continues to spurt blood everyone, a constant ache that he can't remove. He keeps reaching for a person who isn't there any longer, who used to be only inches away. As mediation on loss, the novel becomes scarily effective, pushing into places that most of us don't want to really contemplate, addressing not only the obvious way that our own mortality affects us but the even thornier question of what it does to those that we leave behind. Without a balance, Jeremy teeters. Without a partner, he careens. Without an anchor, he falls away.
The novel is so effective in dealing with the loss of Gail because Simmons somehow manages to make the perfect couple not annoying in the least. Even though they are together partially because of their abilities you get a sense of why they actually like each other, in a way that makes the loss that much worse. He's a different person without. A worse person, not because he becomes mean or thoughtless, but because he becomes incomplete. Just because he's telepathic doesn't mean he's special. He has to deal with it the same way the rest of us do, the long and hard way.
Unfortunately, Simmons goes and hedges his bets and instead of giving us a novel dealing purely with his loss and how he eventually copes with it, he has to go and throw in some action sequences. Maybe he hadn't entirely removed himself from a horror style of writing, or maybe he felt the novel could use a bit of a kick, but the sections where Jeremy has to deal with hitmen and a serial killer feel so different from the rest of the book it could be happening to someone else entirely. On one level it ruins the purity of the whole thing, almost threatening to turn a rather hard-hitting examination of loss in a science-fictional context to a Lifetime movie where Jeremy has to shoot his way off a plane full of mobsters. Whereas Silverberg's novel gained power by keeping everything as mundane as humanly possible in terms of setting, it's almost feels like Simmons wasn't behind the concept enough to really go for it all the way. Fortunately he would grow out of this and later novels like "Phases of Gravity", a rumination on maturing and aging when all your best days may be behind you, barely features any SF elements at all.
Instead, for now, we have this. He attempts to ground this all in reality by trying to explain the telepathy, which wasn't necessary but I appreciate him trying. Amazingly, he seems to come up with a mathematical explanation for telepathy, which people who are smarter than me will have to verify how accurate the math theories are (it may have been cutting edge for 1992). And we also have a blind and deaf boy that also seems to be able to peek into their heads.
In the end though, the happy ending feels a little like a cop-out. We get people who are searching for an escape, any kind of escape, from loss. Jeremy catapults himself across the country. His wife attempts to bury her fear in hope. The old mathematician takes a blind leap of faith to literally create for himself a world that is better than this. And in the end, they're luckier than all of us. They achieve a closeness that most people can't even fathom, get years with those people, and they still want more. It's not enough. And they're right It isn't. A hundred years might not be. They don't want to let go, when they have to let go. And while that feels optimistic in a sense, it also feels like wishful thinking. The hardest part of loss is that it is loss, it is final and it is inevitable. And when the novel focuses on this, holds this unpleasant reality up to the light and examines it coldly, that's where it gains its power. Not from the math, not from the serial killer, not from the Vegas scenes. It works best when it uses the telepathy to remind us of the connections we create throughout our lives, and how they change us, and how the severing of them changes us yet again, sends us reeling. And if we learn anything from Jeremy's grieving flight across the country, it's that you can have the entire world to roam in, and still not put any distance between you and other people.
Summary of The Hollow Man
Jeremy Bremen has a secret. All his life he's been cursed with the ability to read minds. He knows the secret thoughts, fears, and desires of others as if they were his own. For years, his wife, Gail, has served as a shield between Jeremy and the burden of this terrible knowledge. But Gail is dying, her mindebbing slowly away, leaving him vulnerable to the chaotic flood of thought that threatens to sweep away his sanity. Now Jeremy is on the run--from his mind, from his past, from himself--hoping to find peace in isolation. Instead he witnesses an act of brutality that propels him on a treacherous trek across a
dark and dangerous America. From a fantasy theme park to the lair of a killer to a sterile hospital room in St. Louis, he follows a voice that is calling him to witness the stunning mystery at the heart of mortality.
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