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[bibliogramma]

Blue Light, by Walter Mosley

I’m not really sure what to say about this book. Mosley’s prose is beautifully evocative, his characters are well-realised, and there is something about the way this novel is written that pulls the reader along, eagerly, anxiously, almost breathlessly, to the final pages… and yet I’m left feeling unfulfilled. And more than a little confused.

Blue Light is set in the 1960s, a time of breaking down of all kinds of barriers. People were questioning the accepted standards of social behaviour – rethinking sexual mores, challenging received “wisdom” in all manner of intellectual disciplines, questioning social conventions, exploring consciousness with meditation, drugs, spiritual and philosophical concepts from outside of the mainstream European tradition. It was the decade of the civil rights movement, the second wave of feminism, the beginning of gay liberation, the counter-culture, ecological consciousness, protest movements and revolutionary cadres, cults and communes, going back to the land and listening to the fairies at the bottom of the garden.

The novel, which has been variously classed as science fiction, fantasy and horror, could just as well be an account of the rise and fall of one of that chaotic decade’s more bizarre and violent religious cults-gone-wrong, if one dismisses the narrator’s recounting of unearthly sensations and experiences as the product of drugs or madness. And the matter of the reliability of the narrator is one of the key issues in my attempt to understand this book – because it seems to me that Mosley has written something that he wants people to think about, to try to understand.

The conceit of the book is that an ancient people or some other kind of consciousness from not of Earth has sent something, or perhaps simply released something without real intention – consciousness, a message, a mission, an infection, a collection of memories – into the vastness of space, where it has travelled for perhaps millions of years, and has perhaps encountered many planets, before some portion of it arrives on Earth, in 1965, in California. Perceived and later described by those who experience it as beams or shards or pieces or packets of “blue light,” this alien energy has diverse and unique affects on whatever life it touches – plant, animal, and human. Many of the creatures touched don’t survive the transformations, but among those that do are 16 humans, a pregnant coyote, a dog and a giant redwood tree. While we never are really certain what the blue light is or what it does, or was intended to do [1], the general effect on the human “Blues”[2] is to transform them from ordinary human beings into personifications or avatars of whatever kind of human experience they were most caught up in at the time of their transformation. A woman engaged in sex becomes an avatar of lust. A dying man becomes the personification of death, the enemy of all life. A murderer becomes an exemplar of mindless violence and destruction. A young woman with a curious mind becomes a seeker and eventual repository of human knowledge. And so on.[3]

The narrator is a mixed race former grad student named Lester Foote, who has taken the name of Chance. Not a Blue himself, he is rescued by the Blue “teacher” Ordé from a state of psychological collapse and suicidal despair brought about by his marginalised racial status and lack of a community of identity: “I spoke the white man's language. I dreamed his dreams. But when I woke up, no one recognized me.” Later, through a ritual involving sharing of blood with Ordé, a white ex-hippie turned leader of the Close Congregation, a cult-like community to which several of the Blues have been drawn, Chance becomes “half-blue,” and gains some powers of unusual perception. Still neither wholly of one people or another, Chance appoints himself the historian of the Blue Light.

The novel is organised into three sections. The first part introduces the situation and many of the key characters. One of its focuses is on Ordé, his mystical teachings based on his understanding of what has happened to him, the community of Blues and humans that gathers around him, his attempts to reproduce the blue light in human form – with lethal consequences – and the police who have begun to be suspicious of what they perceive as another hippie sex and drug cult. The other is on Grey Redstar, the name adopted by the energy/entity that animates the body of Horace LaFontaine as he lies dying in the path of the blue light. This section culminates in a confrontation between Redstar and the Close Congregation in which many of the Blues are killed, one of the police investigators is severely injured and some of the surviving Blues flee for safety in the company of Chance.

The second part focuses on the investigation of Greystar’s attack – as later told to Chance by the characters involved. In the course of the investigation, several more “half-blues” are formed as investigators and Blue witnesses/suspects/persons of interest interact.

The final part of the novel brings together the Blues who fled with Chance, the “half-blue” investigators, and a previously unseen Blue, Juan Thrombone [4], who has created a new Eden somewhere in the depths of a national redwood forest where he tends the seedlings of the blue redwood tree, yet another casualty of Grey Redstar. Thrombone hopes to preserve and foster the blues in this secret, safe space, but instead it becomes the site of the final confrontation between Grey Redstar and the surviving Blues.

The outcome is… inconclusive, and we are left at the end of the book not knowing if the influence of the blue light will continue in the Earth or not, and indeed, whether we really would have wanted it to survive. We never really learn where the transformation might have led humanity; there are enough acts of selfishness, carelessness and violence from all of the Blues, not just those who personify Violence and Death, to suggest that becoming blue may bring new powers and abilities and a new perspective, but not necessarily a better or more principled one, wise enough to use its gifts well.

Whatever might have been, the clear suggestion at the end is that the chance has come and gone. It’s the 1980s, Chance himself has been in a mental institution for a very long time, and he has no idea if any of the Blues are still alive. The book begins and ends with Chance’s madness, which is the result of Chance’s perpetual state of being neither one thing nor the other, neither black nor white, neither human nor blue.

The blue light – which could simply be a symbol for the phenomenon of the 60s and its various and often contradictory transformations – may be the topic of the novel but Chance is its protagonist. Is Mosley trying to say that our chance to unravel the weight of the past and try something new has also passed, leaving us with a lot of strange memories, but essentially unchanged? Or is there some other message in the fact that Chance has survived at all, and in the possibility that there may be some Blues who escaped the final confrontation between – not Good and Evil, but Life and Death?

Damned if I know.



[1] I’m reminded of H.P.Lovecraft’s short story, “The Colour out of Space” in which something, characterised as a colour, quite indescribable and incomprehensible, affects life in a relatively small geographic area for reasons that are never understood by the characters and never revealed to the reader.

[2] There's a lot of emphasis on how the blue light seems, to some, to be like music, or the how the inexplicable sense that draws the Blues to each other is a sound, a form of music. Are the Blues (regardless of race, as we see white, black, Asian and Hispanic Blues) somehow a personification of the blues, the musical art form that was developed by Blacks to express their own experiences?

[3] I’m not by any means an expert on the topic of the spirits of African and Caribbean tradition known as loas or orishas, but it seemed to me that at least some of the Blues can be linked to some of the more well-known loas, such as Papa Legba, Erzulie and Baron Samedi, and the way in which they seem to be possessed and altered may in some respects resemble the phenomenon of being possessed or “ridden” by a loa. I’ve looked at various reviews to see if anyone else has commented on these apparent similarities, and so far I haven’t found anyone else who sees this, so maybe I’m completely out to lunch.

[4] Juan Thrombone is a trickster/magician character; his human body is that of a Hispanic or Latino man, and while some reviewers have tried to identify him with characters from Tolkien’s created Anglo-Saxon mythology such as Gandalf or Tom Bombadil, I can’t help but associate him with Carlos Casaneda’s Yanqui sorcerer, Don Juan Matus.