Book Review: Eye of Cat

Roger Zelazny

1982

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

I’ve been taking a break from the old award-winner grind, reading books that I just want to read because they look like they’d be fun. I wasn’t planning on writing about any of them, but of course I can’t help it.

Eye of Cat is one of these non-award-winners that did, indeed, turn out to be fun. It has a suspenseful plot, with an appealing hero chased by a scary (and yet also oddly appealing) alien pursuer. The imagery is abstract and surreal, and yet still accessible.

The story takes place in the relatively near future, when space travel is common and humans have made contact with many alien races. The main character is Billy Singer, one of the last remaining Navajo on Earth.

Billy is an outer space hunter. He works as a sort of an independent contractor for a scientific institution (or maybe it’s really just a zoo), using a combination of traditional methods and modern technology to track and capture extraterrestrial life forms, and bringing them back to Earth for observation.

                                                     

Billy didn’t know it at the time he captured it, but one of the extraterrestrials he brought back, a Torglind metamorph, is actually sentient and highly intelligent. And it has been harboring a deep and ever-growing hatred of humans, and of Billy in particular, since he brought it to the zoo forty years ago.

When Eye of Cat opens, Billy is on the edge of retirement, but has been hired by the government for a one-off contract job. They have information that a dangerous alien assassin is somewhere on Earth and is planning to kill an alien ambassador who is visiting our planet on a diplomatic mission. Billy’s job is to track down the assassin and neutralize it. But he quickly learns that the assassin’s abilities to evade detection and capture are way above his head. And he eventually realizes that the only thing on Earth with the ability to catch it is the Torglind metamorph.

So he strikes a deal. If the metamorph helps him to catch the assassin, Billy offers to set it free—and to give it one week to try to hunt him and kill him if it can. The metamorph gladly accepts.

To survive the chase that follows, Billy learns that he must reconnect with Navajo tradition, something he tried to leave behind many years ago. It means that he has to go on not only a tough physical journey but also a trying psychological one. It becomes a semi-supernatural, often hallucinatory experience in which he faces his own life and also the history of his own people while simultaneously trying to outrun and, if possible, turn the tables on the relentless metamorph.

Zelazny is, as always, great at crafting the kind of surrealism necessary for this kind of a story. He sprinkles Navajo poems and songs throughout the book. He writes half-real, half-dream sequences with symbols full of double meaning. He presents the thoughts of both Billy and the metamorph as stream-of-consciousness passages with letters omitted, added, and misplaced. It is often disturbing and disjointed and confusing and yet still strangely understandable at the same time. I don’t know how he manages to come up with these things; I don’t know how he knows what to put where to make it have this effect.

I’ll admit that all this Native American imagery written by a Polish-Irish fellow might come off a little clichéd nowadays. But I thought he did a good job of it.  

A nice postscript to that end is that Zelazny dedicated Eye of Cat to detective writer Tony Hillerman and to his two (fictional) Navajo detectives. According to Wikipedia, Hillerman then "repaid the compliment by having one of his characters reading a Zelazny novel while on a stakeout."