Talking Man by Terry Bisson

Talking Man Reviews

• 
  Craig

  This was fun and imaginative and very well written, but I'm not really sure what it all meant. It's an aggressively non-urban fantasy quest novel, a road trip story, and is peopled with interesting though not especially sympathetic or likable characters. They go places and do stuff and chase things, some of which are quite commonplace and many of which are decidedly not. Reality seems to fade in and out without explanation. There are pleasantly mythic overtones, but nothing became clear. I'm not sure whether or not the good guys won...
• 
  Mike

  I really wanted to love Talking Man. I wanted to love it because 1) Terry Bisson is a terrific guy and, though this is the first of his books I've read in its entirety, I've loved his short stories in the past, 2) Michael Swanwick piqued my curiosity about it many years ago when he praised it in his seminal essay "In the Tradition...", and 3) Bisson is participating here in a project I find truly compelling and undervalued: injecting a strong dose of magic into a gritty contemporary American setting. This practice has led to work both magnificent (John Crowley's Little, Big, Sean Stewart's Galveston) and middling (Steven Sherrill's The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break). Talking Man belongs to the latter category. There are some arresting images, some strong sentences--Bisson is masterful at describing landscapes, especially when they dash past the driver's side window--but on the whole it's a barren, half-hearted, and ultimately forgettable novel.
• 
  The Sheila

  The creator of the universe may also be a bad-tempered old whiskey-swilling car mechanic, and his worst enemy may be his ex-wife (in a Chevrolet, but not really). A road trip across the American Myth to the cold heart of the world. My only complaint is that there wasn't more of it--if you're going to work on the level of myth, you need to be prepared for that grand and complicated scale. Somewhere between this and American Gods would be absolutely perfect. But closer to this.
• 
  Dee

  Talking Man is perhaps the best fantasy book I have read. Well, what can "best" mean? Probably "that I am most glad to have read." Whereas some books are so gripping that I cannot put them down in order to sooth some discomfort from, say, a bad chair or crick in my neck, Talking Man made me so comfortable there was no discomfort to distract me, no willpower required to stay seated. Moving forward with perfect ease, a traveler (or reader) may travel far simply for the pleasure of movement.
  
  I have much to say about this short book, and too little time as I write, at present, so please forgive my careless grammar and mixed tenses.
  
  It is the hybrid structure of this tale, myth told in a manner similar to many American road movies and the effortless, affable character of the narration which led me so easily. There are plenty of reviews mentioning the whimsy and broad imagination of the book, the easy language of the South and authenticity of it's Americana and so forth, so I'd like to think about the structure of this tale.
  
  Myths and novels ... "Talking Man" is both those things. To contrast, "The Hobbit" is a great example of the heroic journey, a fact Tolkien expresses self-consciously, text-within-the-text reference style, in Bilbo's book about his adventure, "There and Back Again." Tolkien was an expert craftsman, and master artificer, and wrote a most perfect there and back again novel length myth and fairytale. "Talking Man," is a novel, not a fairytale tho' it is mythical. It encompasses more than one character's or one group's journey so it is not a geometrically perfect fairytale or myth; it is an excellent short novel. It isn't as the masterful as the greater novels in the Western Cannon of literature and its craft is not a perfect as Tolkien's but it is still "the best fantasy book I have read." The five stars it earns are for my subjective reading experience.
  
  At the start, we a have a very nice, homey setting and an interesting, partial history, which is disturbed-the way many stories begin. The more comfortable and homey the initial setting is, the more motivated I am to read about how the characters restore it's balance once it has been disturbed. So the idyllic, comfy, friendly, quirky home of our characters is upset. Because they are so lovable, this perturbed me. powerfully. I wanted them safe and happy I had to read until I knew they were! The charms of quirky mystery such as magical engine repair, promised secrets to be revealed as the heroine's journey unrolled.
  
  Crystal pulls a friend along as she chases her father the god/wizard, who in turn is chased by terrible Dgene, his archetypal antagonist, whom he created in a long gone era of the universe. The question of what, why and hows, of origins are a mystery which in addition to my sympathy with the characters, magnetically drew me along with the characters in various cars across an incredible, changing, magical American dreamscape.
  
  The constant change in the landscape is reflected in the transformation of the characters and unfolding of their relationships. As the landscape is revealed, history and mystery are revealed to our protagonist, Crystal, who motors up along her father's tail stream, then to her friend-become-lover, William Williams, who's pulled along in HER tail stream. And finally these revelations drew the me along as in a tailstream. In my reading, I found myself invested in them all, every character, even in (oppositionally to) Dgene, the antagonist.
• 
  David

  The great American fantasy/road trip/love story/apocalyptic/adventure/car chase novel.
• 
  Jack

  A beautiful and strange story, unlike anything else I've read. Bisson introduces with equal aplomb the sound of an old John Deere A tractor (Boom chunk chunk chunk boom chunk chunk) and the sight of the six-mile wide Mississippi River Canyon, with fishermen dragging out 1700 year-old catfish as big as a house. In the best possible sense, a book full of magic.
• 
  Dalibor Dado Ivanovic

  Simpatična knjiga, onako road stil sa dozom sf/f
• 
  Robert Nolin

  After reading a wonderful story by Terry Bisson, "Scout's Honor," I decided to check out his work. I loved his recent book "Any Day Now," which featured an alternate history of the sixties and a protagonist who was a mechanic. Bisson's an auto mechanic, among other things. Then I read "The Pickup Artist," which was okay, funny. Today I read the short novel in question, and it contained some of the same things from the other two novels. Road trips, for one. Both "Any Day Now" and this book contain alternate versions of America. And auto mechanics. Hmm. But "Talking Man" was boring as hell. It's nearly all one long car ride with two characters who, though having just met, hardly ever say more than three words to each other. Imagine a road trip with no talking. Boring. Who are these two people? We aren't shown. It's in very limited third person, and there's no view into their heads. So if neither is talking and the author ain't saying much either, there's no reason to care about these two. The title character, for some reason, never talks at all! He's a wizard, and a car mechanic, and the story is about two teenagers driving all the way from Kentucky to New Mexico for, really, no reason, other than that Talking Man has gone there, and they are trying to find him. Why? We don't know until the end. From New Mexico (which morphs into Mexico, while everything else slowly changes, too, though why is never explained) they head to...um, the North Pole. Which is now no longer a polar ice cap, but is instead a bunch of empty identical blockhouses with nobody home. Why are they there? No idea. The final magical confrontation between Talking Man and his former sorceress girlfriend gone bad (again, no explanation given for why she's turned evil) is, to say the least, disappointingly dull and leaves nearly everything unanswered.
  
  The two teenagers are trailer trash from the south, the girl smokes a lot and the book seems to be filled with her lighting cigarettes and the two of them switching places, while driving, which I suppose is meant to convey some sense of urgency. Yawn. Our male teen seems to be romantically inclined, due to the presence on the girl's chest of boobs. They eat nothing but junk food...I mean, really, it was hard to find any reason to care for these two. Give us some back story, some emotional content. Something. Bisson seems more interested in automobiles than his characters, as we are given blow by blow descriptions of auto repairs, including exact wrench sizes. This gets really silly when the car breaks down conveniently near a crashed airplane which has a part that can fix the car. Are you kidding me? Two pages of car maintenance ensues, with Talking Man magically installing the part with some magical saliva. OMG.
  
  This was Bisson's second book, and dates from the mid-80's. I suppose that, back then, it was somewhat cutting edge to have a fantasy without dragons and knights, but, instead, a humming cracker who can make cars lift off the ground, ala Yoda. Urban fantasy came soon after, and now it seems there's nothing to recommend a book like this that conflates "fantasy" with "weird stuff happening for no freaking reason" and characters with less appeal than a Shell No-Pest Strip. Ugh.
• 
  Ömer Oral

  It's too tiresomely personal and difficult to go into. I never grasped what it tried to hint, and I do not certainly wonder it.
• 
  Karen

  Just started and what a wild ride.