The Millennium Quartet, Book 3:
Chariot
by Charles Grant
Tor. © 1998, Charles Grant. 309 pages (paper).
But for all that, Trey is not your typical gambler. For one
thing, Trey Falkirk wins. Consistently. So consistently, in fact, that he
has to be careful not to win too much or play the same casino too often,
lest he be banned as some sort of cheat. For another thing, Trey's reason
for gambling is different from that of most professional gamblers: He didn't
exactly choose the "career"; it was thrust upon him. Undergraduate studies
of English and music did not lead to lucrative positions, and when his plans
to attend graduate school came to naught, Trey fell back on subsistence jobs
such as clerking in doughnut shops and convenience stores. He might have
remained the world's most literate full-time retail clerk had it not been
for another factor, a sort of curse that dogged him from job to job and from
city to city: He is a magnet for violence. Everywhere Trey has ever lived,
he has suffered severe injury. He has been beaten up countless times, lain
in countless hospital beds. Everywhere, that is, except Las Vegas.
In Las Vegas, in fact, it seems Trey can't be hurt at all.
Despite numerous close brushes with death (including a rattlesnake bite,
an encounter with a gun-toting maniac, and nearly being run down by a car),
he is barely scratched. Superstitious gambler that he is, Trey has become
convinced that, as long as he is within the Las Vegas city limits, he is
essentially invulnerable. Moreover, he has also become convinced that he
is in some mysterious way returning the favor: Las Vegas has been spared
the Sickness. The world is in the grip of a horrible epidemic, a new form
of smallpox that spreads in patterns that have doctors baffled. Yet despite
continuing to receive visiting gamblers from all over the globe, Las Vegas
has not suffered a single case. Trey and the city Bugsy Segal built
have become each other's lucky charm. So Trey holes up in the dying, ironically
named little development community of Emerald City, out in the desert but
just inside the city limits. From this hideaway he sallies forth to "battle
the dragon"--to literary-minded Trey, the city's countless neon lights suggest
iridescent, reptilian scales--gambling just often enough to pay the bills
and put a little away for the rainy day he is certain will come.
Trey's neighbors are a collection of oddballs and outsiders
with whom he gets along reasonably well, although some of them resent his
obvious ability to live without working and his natural physical strength,
which he maintains without any need to visit a gym. His real friends are
the Levins, hippie Jude and her two daughters, Starshine and Moonbow. Little
Moonbow is Trey's best friend of all, and she would very much like Trey to
marry her mother. Trey would like that, too, for he loves Jude despite the
disfigured face she hides behind a veil. But Jude is the unnamed Queen in
the little medieval fantasy world Trey and Moonbow have created, and Trey
does not see himself as the sort of man a queen could ever
love.
Often enough, Trey thinks of leaving Emerald City--but he can't.
He's afraid. Afraid he'll die, afraid the city will die, afraid to think
about the probably paranormal origins of his luck and the reciprocal
invulnerability he and Las Vegas share. And you'd be afraid, too, if you
were marked to oppose one of the
Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse.
By now you know the signs: You are roaming the millennial
imagination of Charles Grant. Chariot, the third volume
of his Millennium Quartet, takes up the apocalyptic tale begun
in Symphony
and continued in In the Mood.
The foe this time around is Plague, who, like the other Horsemen,
appears in human form. The appropriateness of Plague's avatar is perhaps
a matter of the individual reader's taste, but there is just no quibbling
with Plague's methods: Whether spreading the Sickness or enticing human minions,
this Horseman works as insidiously as pathogens slipping from one host to
another. This is creepy stuff.
The earlier novels' twin apocalyptic metaphors, music and riding,
are both present in Chariot. The musical metaphor is ambiguous
here, because it is linked to characters on both sides of the conflict. There
is no ambiguity about riding, however: Horsemanship is the exclusive purview
of Plague and its human servitors. Trey is, by pointed contrast, a charioteer
(like the fellow depicted on his lucky chip) rather than a horseman. When
Moonbow tells him that a warrior needs a horse to ride into battle with a
dragon, Trey replies that his old black pickup truck is his "chariot"--and
Moonbow eventually decides that the idea makes perfect sense (pp.
27-28).
The theological questions I voiced in my reviews of the previous
two installments find no resolution here. If seminary-trained
Reverend Casey Chisholm couldn't unravel the
conundrum of the Horsemen's place in God's scheme of things, it's no surprise
that Trey, who shares John Bannock's lack of
interest in religion, can't either. Confronted with the knowledge that Plague
is, "theoretically, one of the Good Guys," all Trey can do is tell himself,
"just keep it straight and simple, don't get yourself lost in a Biblical
swamp" (p. 259). Despite indulging in vices such as anger, cruelty, and
vengeance, and despite subtly playing on human weakness to build an
army of willing murderers, Plague bridles at any identification with the
Devil (p. 220). The Horsemen remain terrible destroyers who are somehow on
God's side, yet shirk at no evil to accomplish their goals.
Chariot 's theological shortcomings are no reason not to read
it, though. Grant continues to engage and entertain in the style to which
we've become accustomed in this series, with an exciting and unpredictable
plot, evocative prose, imaginative takes on the apocalyptic theme, and characters
who are believable despite their eccentricities. As usual, Grant keeps us
guessing: What is the origin of Trey's incredible luck and his sympatico
with machinery? Who are Lord and Lady Harp, and why--if they really are just
ordinary human beings, as they claim--are they able to do things other people
can't? How can an old black pickup truck possibly help a man face down one
of the dread Horsemen? I can't answer these questions, and wouldn't if I
could. I wouldn't want to deprive you of the pleasure of drawing your own
conclusions. So climb aboard and join Trey on his wild, apocalyptic chariot
ride. You'll enjoy the trip--and making it is the only way to prepare for
humanity's final confrontation with the Horsemen in the series' conclusion,
Riders in the Sky.
Edited September 24, 2000.
Copyright ©2000 by Steven R. Solomon. All rights reserved.
Book Review
by Steve Solomon
GAMBLERS, AS EVERYONE KNOWS, have their superstitions and quirks,
and Wallace Thackery Falkirk is no exception. He wears a lucky casino chip
depicting a charioteer on a cord around his neck. He goes through a
ritual of preparation after entering a casino but before approaching
the slots. Another ritual precedes the actual gambling: He talks to
the one-armed bandits and lays his hand on them, moving from machine to machine
until he finds one that "talks back." A second-generation gambler, he even
has a gambler's nickname given to him by his card-playing mother: He is Trey,
her third child.
Please send comments to
srsgm@pacbell.net.