Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein

Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein @ Amazon.com

They say that you should not look back at some things.  One example would be looking up old girlfriends.  Another I’ve discovered is reading a book from your adolescence.

I should have known better.  When I was but a wee lad, I loved the movie Swiss Family Robinson.  It was a movie I had viewed several times as a youngster.  After VCRs became popular I rented a copy one night to share with my two children.  I wanted them to experience the joy I had felt watching this movie.   My kids thought it absolutely lame, and I could not keep them in the room.  At this point I don’t remember whether I sat through the whole movie, but I am recalling that I did not.

When I was a teenager I thought Robert A. Heinlein just hung the moon.  His book Stranger in a Strange Land was at one point the ultimate novel and the ultimate philosophical work, in my humble 17 year old mind.  I must have read it a dozen times in the space of a few years.   To me Glory Road was not far behind.  I also read it multiple times.

Recently I was wondering through an enormous bookstore in Portland, OR and came across a copy of Glory Road.  Feeling the need to relive a fond childhood memory I bought a copy.

I should have left well enough alone.  Reading this book as a middle age man I understand why my teenage self enjoyed it so.  Heinlein would have been around 55 or 56 when he wrote this.  I did not find it the work of a mature writer unless he was deliberately “marketing” to a teenage male audience.  I will give him the benefit of the doubt and say that is what he was doing.

I had a tough time getting through the book this round.  The characters were basically shallow and predictable.  There is the swashbuckling hero who has basically been a rebel all his life, and as it turns out manipulated (for good) by great forces.  There is the scheming, beautiful woman who turns out to be not what she seems to be.  And finally a Sancho Panza style character. None of the characters really grow or change with the exception of “Oscar”, our hero.  And like me Oscar finally realizes that you cannot go backwards.  Unfortunately, this is his only growth as a character.

The story line is utterly predictable.  Even those passages that were supposed to provide a plot twisted were just about telegraphed on page one.  We knew before he did that he would have to face an inner demon.  But come on, rats.  Rats crawling on a homeless boy causing adulthood phobias.  Now that is what I call inventive.

Perhaps what was the most painful to me was the dialogue.  The “My Princess” and “Yes, Me Lord” become tiresome rather quickly.  Towards the end of the book our lovers begin to fall apart.  The dialogue of their arguments fell apart for me too.  It quickly became something I skipped over.

At some point in Heinlein’s writing he got so wrapped in espousing his personal  philosophy that he became unreadable to me.  He is getting a good start in this book.  He pounds into you that government is bad, and the best government is one that governs less.  He goes on to denounce democracy because the masses do not have enough sense to know what is right.  He is big proponent of free love and anything goes sexually.  But for some reason, he comes across as a misogynist to me.

I will say this, I have a couple ideas that I have been repeating for years.  Until I reread this book I had no idea where they came.  I’m not delusional enough to think the memes were mine, but I had forgotten their source.  That almost makes them yours, right?  One was that women and cats are very similar.  When they want affection you had better give it to them, and when they don’t you had better leave them alone.  This is an idea Heinlein expressed in the book that I picked up.  Who knows if it is original with him?  Another was idea was that the perfect age to be and stop aging would 35.  I’m not going to argue with either.

If you can suspend the critical thinking part of your mind, you will probably enjoy this.  I personally wish I had left it on the shelf and recalled the fond memories from my teenage years.  For pure swashbuckling fantasy and adventure Edgar Rice Boroughs John Carter on Mars makes for better reading.