The Dreaming Jewels (Paperback)

perfect by any means, but it's always been my favorite
Sturgeon novel.

The main character of the novel is a boy named Horty. Sturgeon delivers a sometimes heartbreaking description of the little fellow's life. Orphaned as a baby, he spent time in an orphanage before being taken in (for all the wrong reasons) by a horrible judge and his weak-willed wife. All he really has in life is an old jack-in-the-box, the eyes of which consist of two remarkable crystals. As the novel opens, Horty has been caught eating ants underneath the school bleachers; here is your first clue that Horty is not your typical kid. His guardians, never kind and caring at the best of times, are furious, and the ensuing dramatic confrontation ends with Horty running away, leaving three severed fingers behind. He sneaks on to a carnival truck and finds himself living happily, disguised as a girl for reasons the novel makes plain, among a host of strange but caring "outsider" type of people. During his stay of several years, his severed fingers grow back and he does not grow at all, further clues that he is not a normal human child. The owner of the carnival is a rather vicious fellow out to destroy humanity with a source of crystal power he researches and experiments with obsessively. Eventually, all of the people Horty has known, both the good and the bad, come together for an inevitable confrontation. Horty can only survive by figuring out exactly who and what he really is.

The relationships between Horty and his carnival friends are really quite touching, and the evil of those who would use or abuse Horty is equally disturbing. Sturgeon can put an incredible amount of emotion into the shortest of sentences, and the reader definitely becomes emotionally involved in the story. One of the problems with The Dreaming Jewels, though, concerns the nature of the important crystals described in the story and the means by which they can provide power to anyone who can truly communicate with them. Some of the mystery is stripped away in the first few pages of the novel, although the small reference I refer to could be overlooked by the casual reader. The fantasy elements, in the end, just come off as slightly absurd. This does nothing to rob the novel of its immense human warmth, but it did have a somewhat negative impact on my reading of the book.

The book begins, "They caught the kid doing something disgusting out under the bleachers at the high-school stadium ..." and one is left quite deliberately to one's presumably lurid imagination until page 4, where the nature of the offense is revealed ... though the point of the episode is saved for much later, when it fits in naturally with the basic premise. The inane vulgarity of that opening line represents one of the two poles of Sturgeon's Manichaean world.

The book is a real pleasure to read, on several levels. There is a quiet humor and intelligence behind the story (and perhaps an air of desperation as well). These themes were tackled in more direct ways by Kerouac and Salinger, among others in the U.S. Sturgeon's approach is more reminiscent of Hesse or Kafka; he's not in their league, by any means, but he's good in his own way. His characterization is generally weak and one-dimensional, perhaps to the point of self-parody. This is often the case in satire (Swift, Vonnegut). Sturgeon is less interested in his characters than in their various epic struggles, internal and external, but endows the key ones with enough life to keep them interesting. His greatest weakness is his adherence to the rule that the bad shall be punished and the good rewarded, before the final curtain. This is really not consistent with his world view.

I've been a bit heavy-handed in my description - Sturgeon doesn't beat you over the head with his big themes, but he doesn't bury them either. He just tells a simple story of a badly mistreated orphan with a curious jack-in-the-box with glowing eyes, and lets you make of it what you will.

I should add that Sturgeon's "More than Human" is a distinctly stronger book with related themes and a more interesting premise, and one should read that novel before this one; if that doesn't give you considerable pleasure, then you may as well leave this one alone.