Camp Concentration [Paperback]

So what's the story? It's the 1970s and the US is fighting a land war in Asia. If this sounds like history remember that Disch is writing in 1968, so to him it's the future; one in which the Asian conflict has spun out of control, America is losing its edge, and battlefield nukes and germ weapons are being deployed. These horrors are never described, but suggested in tiny chilling clues--overheard rumors, the cover of a news magazine, a reluctance to shake hands for fear of catching something deadly. This is appropriate, because the book's real battlefield is not Malaysia, plague-ravaged California, or indeed anywhere on the planet. It is the human soul, from which all these nightmares have sprung.

In particular it's the soul of Louis Sacchetti, a good Catholic boy who's been thrown into jail for refusing to fight. Louis is a poet, a smugly superior intellectual who's suffering (a bit too enthusiastically) a spiritual martyrdom at the hands of his inferior fellow men. And yet he's baffled by these ordinary guys, with their ironclad faith in the war and their sincere belief in the rightness of killing. He's bright, but he's no Einstein. Not yet anyway.

Inexplicably transferred to Camp Archimedes, an Army-funded think tank buried somewhere deep underground, Louis finds himself tasked with recording the lives of its inmates. These are convicts like himself: conchies, deserters, petty criminals--ordinary guys except for their ferocious IQ. Louis is shaken to discover that they have volunteered to be infected with a disease that supercharges their intelligence while at the same time rotting their bodies and brains.

Louis agonizes over whether he would accept this Devil's bargain: a degrading death in exchange for nine months of Olympian insight into the workings of the Universe. He decides not. But such understanding leads down disturbing byways: Louis's old schoolmate Mordecai Washington, now at the height of his superhuman intelligence, claims to have figured out God's real purpose in creating man.

Already troubled by these developments, Louis begins to suffer migraines that bring startling new insights, bouts of fever during which he writes complex and beautiful poetry. Gradually he becomes convinced that Mordecai has hit on the truth about the Divine plan.

Meanwhile, Modecai and his colleagues are about to perform their Magnum Opus: the creation of the alchemist's centuries-old dream, the Philosopher's Stone. Can they cheat death by concocting the elixir of everlasting youth? Or are they really, as the increasingly brilliant Louis suspects, pulling some dazzling and incomprehensible confidence trick on their jailers?

By writing "Camp Concentration" as a journal, Thomas Disch tells the story of Louis' rise to genius and descent into terminal insanity in the poet's own words. This gives a visceral punch to ideas that might otherwise seem dry and abstract; Louis' intellectual and physical pain, so eloquently and uncompromisingly expressed, forces us to confront the sobering moral lessons of the past century. And yet the book does not end on a bleak note; at its close there is a very real sense of optimism--an acknowledgment that we may all carry within us the seeds, however undeserved, of our own redemption.

The subject matter of "Camp Concentration" is as relevant today as it was thirty years ago. At times it can be daunting, but if you like being challenged and want more from science fiction than comic-book action, this one's for you. Stick with it and I guarantee you'll come out the other side well rewarded. They don't come much better than this.

Disch's verbal abilities and his mental dexterity are commendable, and are well displayed here. He is less successful at constructing plot intricacies, character development, and dramatic structure. Though it ties in with the plot, Disch's Pynchonesque linguistic display, which reaches a crescendo in the early part of Book Two, come off as the product of a young writer having fun with a highlighter and an unabridged OED.

It's interesting that this novel was published about half a year after Daniel Keyes came out with a very similar book <Flowers for Algernon,> later adapted into a play and then a movie <Charly>. The idea had been around since Keyes first wrote the novella version in 1959. The idea is basically the same. Scientists come up with a formula that makes brain processes accelerate, the subjects become brilliant for a while and then the unforeseen consequences set in. Charly returns to his mentally retarded state, Sacchetti lapses into the final stages of a degenerative disease (syphilis).

Disch does introduce some interesting ideas along the way, however. The effect on the artistic mind of syphilis, in particular, has long been a subject of conjecture. Though some arguments are a lot shakier (Beethoven) than others (de Mauppassant, Nietszche), the subject is definitely open to debate. Disch works such speculation into his story quite effectively. There is also the matter of the way in which the agent (The Palladine) is spread through the surface population (by sexual means) by a rebellious researcher. It does rather spookily prefigure the coming aids epidemic, and probably had some influence on later novelists such as Crichton and King.

There is enough talent, brains and imagination on display here to appeal to "general" readers as well as Sci-Fi aficionados. It's at times intentionally obfuscating, but that's confined to a relatively brief section as the narrator undergoes a mental breakdown. The rest is highly readable. I will definitely seek out more works by the author.

The idea is simple enough. A new drug, developed from the bacteria that causes syphilis, is found to have the property of greatly increasing a person's intelligence, but with major side effect - it kills the user in about nine months. The story follows one Louis Sacchetti, a conscientious objector to a seemingly interminable war, and who would already be considered to be a genius by most standards, as he is transferred from a standard prison to a facility specially constructed to see what will happen to its inmates when given this drug. The story is told through the means of a journal that Louis is encouraged, almost forced, to keep.

As this idea is extremely similar to that of Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon (which was later made into the movie Charly), comparison is invited. Flowers emphasizes the tragedy of the hero, a man who struggles to find those bits of knowledge that will help not just himself but all mankind, up against an unbeatable problem, that of his own death. Camp Concentration follows a completely different path, that of the essential selfishness of the individual, of nihilism, of the despair of ever being able to change humanity in any meaningful way. The inmates that Louis initially documents are apparently using their greatly enhanced intelligence to investigate alchemy as a means of providing immortality, not for humanity in general, but for themselves and the 'warden' of this prison, Humphrey Haast. Louis, meanwhile, seems caught up in crafting new poems and a play, entitled 'Auswitch, A Comedy'. The title is indicative of something Disch does throughout this book, playing with names and titles to produce another layer of meaning behind the straightforward words, and is fairly effective in doing so.

The tone is the primary thing here, a very dark, brooding atmosphere, enlivened by a very wide ranging vocabulary and many references, both buried and open, to other works of literature (most especially Dante), and scientific and psychological theories. Readers who are not familiar with these references may feel a little lost at places in this book - at least I did, as my breadth of knowledge in these areas is clearly more limited than Disch's. But from this tone, Disch develops his themes of the corruption of man, of his baser desires, the absolute horrors of what man is capable of, and where such capacity leads. As such, this book is almost the complete antithesis of Flowers for Algernon - that is, until the ending of this book.

The ending of this book, I felt, rather drastically detracted from its overall message, as it doesn't seem to fit with the rest, and has a little of a deus-ex-machina feel to it. Given the many layered discourse that Disch presented in the rest of the book, which while sometimes difficult to follow, was certainly excellent writing, this ending was a disappointment.

While this is certainly a major entry into the dystopian side of science fiction literature, whether it truly qualifies as a 'classic' will be, I'm afraid, very much a matter of opinion for a long time to come. But it is certainly worth reading, if for nothing else than to see the darker side of genius competently presented.

--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)