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In the literature of Science Fiction, there is no more an
underappreciated and ignored piece of writing than Thea Von
Harbou's magnificent Metropolis. The book, a novelization of the
screenplay the author wrote for her husband Fritz Lang's film
masterpiece of the same name, was a clever marketing move since the
sales of one would drive the sales of the other. Yet the two
existed as independent works of art. That proved true only too
briefly. Something happened soon after the film premiered. The film
studio made drastic and clumsy cuts that made the plot impossible
to follow. Censors, exhibitors, and distributors further slashed
the film to under 90 minutes from its original length of 153
minutes. Consequently, the film's reputation for unprecedented
spectacle and imagination was forged by its transcendent and
timeless visual beauty. And Van Harbou's novel was largely
dismissed as an informational bridge between the film's original
storyline and the multiple butchered versions. Unfortunately, that
has been the way the book has been shelved for most of its
publishing history. But the book has a life and a shelf of its own.
If the film had never come to be made, this book would still offer
a fascinating and emotionally powerful reading experience. We see
the stark thematic contrasts between light and dark, God and Satan,
the saintly Maria and the demonic Rotwang, the conflicts between
starry dreams and manual labor, between steamy pump rooms and
airplanes ferrying through bright high rise avenues. We also see
romantic love and its mechanical counterfeits, a fictional aspect
of the novel that has become eerily true in the age of technosexual
robots. The novel has always stood on its own as a work of art, a
work of romantic notions and hard experience, exploring the limits
of thinking or clubbing our way out of life's most horrific
challenges. The novel offers a possible resolution: The mediator
between brain and muscle must be the Heart. Words that ring
eternally true.
Cass Loyola, a Cuban merchant seaman, abandons the ocean seas to
pursue literature and a better life at a button-down college in New
York City. As he struggles to adjust to his new life, he is haunted
by the woman he left behind in Cardiff--a flame-haired Wiccan
priestess who makes books with inks made from flowers and
seashells. As he journeys from literary readings and champagne
museum soirees in Manhattan to the soft beds of women in the social
register, he becomes less the social brute, but comes to question
his adopted values and fears the loss of his soul, whose outline is
drawn with inks made of flowers and seashells.
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