Planet of the Owls
by Mike Philbin
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Book Summary Information
Author: Mike PhilbinEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-07-15
ISBN: 0981519148
Number of pages: 172
Publisher: Silverthought Press
Book Reviews of Planet of the Owls
Book Review: Not for the squeamish
Summary: 4 Stars
I haven't reviewed anything for a while due to the usual family and work constraints, but if there was a book to come back to that deserves to have some things said about it, that book would certainly be Mike Philbin's Planet of the Owls. It's the story of two teenagers, Marcus (nineteen) in England and Su-Ki (fourteen) in China. They go about otherwise unremarkable lives until one day legions of violent "angels", living Gods, masquerading as giant human-sized birds, descend on the earth and begin the culling of mankind. Sound weird? You would be right.
From there, the plot spirals up into heights of graphic sex and violence the likes of which I've personally only encountered a few times in literature, and rarely with such gut-churning, shameless ferocity. Much of this content can be couched in the bookish safety zone of metaphor, but perhaps not all, which I'll get into in a moment. The book's third act takes place on an earth that teeters on the edge of destruction, with both sides in the tug-of-war spelling impending doom for the human race. Marcus and Su-Ki are caught in this, and find their way to each other eventually, and their everlasting fates.
In any case, let's get this out of the way first: this book is possibly among the most hyper-violent things I've ever read, and it also contains passages of grossly-disturbing sex. I am not easily moved by graphic things, and there were portions of this book that had me literally recoiling from the written words and looking away in the same fashion as someone who can't bear to watch a car wreck that's about to happen. If you pick up this book, be warned that you will read segments of it through the cracks in the hands that you've put over your eyes to keep the imagery out. I like a little bloodshed and passion in my books as much as the next person, but there were certainly over-the-top moments. Waaaaay over the top. And though like I said above much of it could be chalked up to elaborate metaphorical hashing, by the end the violence had reached the point where the same sorts of things started happening again, repeating themselves. For this reason alone would I have preferred a less-is-more approach.
That having been said, this isn't an easy book to read for other reasons as well. Mike Philbin has been writing for a long time, but much is still to be desired of his narrative voice from a technical standpoint. Aside from long passages of interrogative first-person internal monologue that made my eyes droop, he also lacks a firm sense of characterization, particularly of teenagers. The first-person narrative voice of Marcus was serviceable, but written more from the point of view of an older person. Poor Su-Ki, who had a terrific role in the story otherwise, was constantly making westernized cultural references that neither a typical teenager nor a rural Chinese person would have any knowledge of. More tellingly even than that, the narratives at times blended so homogenously that I lost track of which alternating point of view I was following. The story moved along well enough that I never got lost for long, but it's not something you expect to encounter in something so otherwise original and well put together. To be fair, had Philbin brought the technical talent of someone like David LaBounty or David S. Grant to bear on the monologue/dialogue and narrative voice of this book, it might have been difficult for him to ever again match the sheer originality and conceptual brilliance of Planet of the Owls.
That is about the worst I could say for it, though. The subtexts fly like foul balls at a little league game, and it's the most original thing I've read in months. Philbin takes advantage of his own bizarre style to pull off hooting groaners like "I'm being dragged through the woods by this giant cock" and "I was afraid to be in the nest" that don't wink at the reader so much as share with them a can of peanuts that contains spring-loaded cloth snakes. And even after a fourteen year old Chinese girl completely breaks character and goes through a Socratic-style logic and reasoning thought process, the narrative bursts into a moment of redeeming brilliance when she describes the face of a living God.
The misogyny is fast and furious here, with allegories to men gang-raping girls, men reluctant to settle down into "nests", men feeling compelled to kill their "families" and powerful female archetypes "tricking" and "forcing" men into impregnating them, and subsequently having no further use for them. In terms of contextual content, I find it neither offensive nor quite as funny as Bret Easton Ellis' blend, but it did add at least a much-needed tertiary subtext that kept Planet of the Owls from reading as just a lesser (albeit very creative) two-dimensional story.
And while I'm on the topic, if you want to retch at some of the most heinous, in-your-face transgressive fiction you're likely to ever squint at through half-covered eyes, you're barking up the right tree with this book.
Paradoxically, the book's primary strength turns out to also be its greatest weakness. Planet of the Owls doesn't really shine until the final third or so. On the one hand, if you make it that far you're in for a memorable and original ending that doesn't feel the least bit forced or contrived. On the other hand, by the time we get to the ending, we've already had to sit through a hundred pages of Marcus and Su-Ki's rhetorical monologues and several episodes of horrific gross-out-style ultra-sex-violence set pieces. Happily, Philbin brings the intellectual in us back on board in the final act by tying together meaning for the violence and substance for the experience. The book begins to feel less like back-alley anime written by disturbed adolescents and more like a modern retelling of the Divine Comedy of Dante Aligheri, with a ferocious dose of disenfranchised post-feminist white middle class American male thrown in. And so a book that I had settled into despite my better judgment, I found myself feeling very intellectually satisfied finishing.
So, where and how to evaluate a novel that is at once technically flawed and so highly original? Readability isn't the best yardstick here, I think, as it doesn't really reflect the value of Philbin's efforts to completely discard the conventions of tedious genre and topical matter. All of the sexuality that happens here is of the forceful, creepy type, which even though it avoided cliché I thought was a little too easy and lazy for an otherwise serious writer. The internal monologue narrative didn't help this. There are moments, though, particularly in the plotline of Su-Ki's interaction with the angels, that I could see weeks and months perhaps of sitting around and pondering the far edges of this alternate reality that Mike wove with this book. The conceptual depth and imagery is astoundingly good, and beyond the average value of most fiction I read.
Did I think it will endure as a hallmark piece of fiction? No. Did I enjoy it? More and more as I got past the first two-thirds. Is it unique? Oh yeah. Would I recommend it to others? Not my mom, and only a few select other intellectuals, but perhaps. It has a weak rhetorical narrative, it has surprising intellectual depth once you get past the gross-out violence, and its originality and conceptual imagery is absolutely vast.
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