The Hugo Award Winners #3
Gilgamesh in the Outback by Robert Silverberg
Robert Silverberg has amassed a considerable collection of prizes and awards. He has had his share of ups and downs (not surprisingly, given that he is one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century).
The 1987 Hugo Award-winning novel ‘Gilgamesh in the Outback’ is undoubtedly one of his successes. Silverberg has constructed a wonderfully grotesque world: a postmodernist hell where there are no traditional devils with cauldrons of boiling tar. How is it working? All the same as in the past, real-life. Politics, intrigue, dictators and dictatorship, kingdoms, empires, and, of course, wars. One thing is missing — death.
Silverberg stretched the bounds of imagination, populating his underworld with many historical characters, from the Qin Shi Huang Emperor to Howard Lovecraft and Albert Schweitzer. None of them can understand the meaning of Hell; many do not fully understand why they even got there … Probably, it’s impossible, given that in this Hell with them coexist (can not say — “live”) and Gandhi and the prophet Moses.
The main character in the story is Gilgamesh, the King of Uruk, the greatest hero of the past. One of the old residents of Hell, although… As one of the characters said:
Humans are new here. There is no beginning here, only an end.
That’s the point of Silverberg’s Hell. After all, people take there with them all their inner torment, all their sorrows, heartaches, and resentments FOREVER.
What is more terrible and painful — to know that what you have done can not be undone until death or that what you have done may never be undone while you have an eternity of meaningless existence lying before you?
The hero of the story, the great and mighty king Gilgamesh, suffers from this. Already in Hell, he has quarreled with his best friend Enkidu and now dreams of finding him — to avenge, as he thinks, for the mortal insult inflicted. In Hell, however, no insult cannot be mortal — for there is no death; all those “killed” will be returned by the Undertaker anyway.
It is incredible how successfully Silverberg tied together several psychological storylines in a relatively short novella. Apart from Gilgamesh, other essential characters in the story are Howard Lovecraft and Robert Howard, rolling around in a car through Hell as diplomatic representatives of King Henry VIII. Their discussion of Hemingway’s literary merits is such a funny reading, and then they try to explain who they are to Hemingway himself…
I did not know, reading the story, that it is part of a vast multi-author project, the ‘Heroes in Hell’ series. I’m sure that not all books from it are up to the high level of ‘Gilgamesh in Outback’, but I’ll probably check on it.
