Somewhat less murky (Green Lantern: Sleepers, Book Two)

It is still Green Lantern Month and, as I had indicated previously, I have not yet abandoned the Sleepers trilogy of Green Lantern novels. In fact last week I finished reading Book Two of the series. I’m happy to report that the second installment was a marked improvement over the first. Granted, this was not much of an achievement, given how low the bar had been set. I gave Book One a single star on Goodreads, while Book Two got two stars from me. On the one hand, 100% better! On the other hand, still far from great.

Numerous things worked out in Book Two’s favor, from my perspective, but here are three biggies:

1. Historical perspective. Book Two concerns itself almost exclusively with Alan Scott, the Golden Age Green Lantern whose exploits were originally published against the backdrop of World War II. The novel ends up as part origin story for the hero and part WWII adventure. Priest got himself a different co-writer for this outing, Michael Ahn, who is an expert on World War II history and clearly helped bring a wealth of accurate detail to the story, providing some welcome verisimilitude. (Book One, in case I didn’t make it clear last time, is set in the nominal present but is much more a sci-fi yarn, with some time spent on the Moon, some on Saturn, and arguably entirely too much in an anti-matter universe where every aspect of an alternate physical existence has to be invented and over-explained.) Back when the original Green Lantern was a going thing, there was much more emphasis on action and spectacle in the disposable children’s entertainment and correspondingly less time devoted to fleshing out the hero beyond being brave and moral and worth rooting for. Thus the circumstances of Alan Scott’s life before he received his magic green ring, not to mention the inner workings of his heart and mind, are areas where Priest can break new ground, as far as I know. Which more or less leads to the second point …

2. Alan Scott is not my favorite GL. I like Alan as a character, I appreciate how he fits into the whole mythos of the legacy, but I haven’t read and re-read his adventures obsessively, the way I have for Hal Jordan and Kyle Rayner. I was quick to jump on Book One for portraying Kyle as a bit of an idiot, because in my opinion that’s not consistent with the character I know and love. Book Two portrays Alan with his own quirks and flaws, but none of them rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe it was a more faithful rendering of the character, maybe I just didn’t notice the liberties Priest took fleshing out the original GL because I’m not overly familiar with the character, but the fact is, the book as a whole went down significantly easier. Including, in the third point …

3. A much better villain. I’ve tried many times (hereabouts and elsewhere) to identify the major differences between serious art and genre trash, but it’s entirely possible that the easiest way to separate the two is to ask whether or not a story has an unmistakable Bad Guy wrapped up in the central conflict. If it doesn’t, it’s probably literature; if it does, it’s closer to the pulp ghetto that I adore. (If there is no central conflict, it’s really not my cup of tea.) Villains are a ton of fun, especially when they’re done well, and supervillains even moreso. Malvolio, the antagonist in Sleepers: Book Two, makes an excellent foil for Alan Scott and memorable baddie in his own right. It’s a character Priest created himself when he was writing Green Lantern comics, so that makes a certain amount of sense. Certainly Malvolio makes a more compelling threat than the strange Sinestro clone-hybrid who divides his mental energies between serving the anti-matter Qwardians and macking on Jenny-Lynn in Book One. (If most if not all of the preceding sentence seems like gibberish, please rest assured that it didn’t make much more sense than that to me, a GL-fanatic, reading the actual novel in question.)

A distressing side effect of my recognition of Book Two’s superiority is this: I started wondering, since Malvolio seems like a perfect fit for just about any Alan Scott story and particularly the one Priest chose to tell in the novel, why in the world couldn’t Kyle have gotten similar treatment? Instead of the mishmash of Sinestro (who is really Hal Jordan’s arch-enemy) and random invented psychobabble, why not just use … just … And then it hit me: Kyle Rayner’s rogues’ gallery is pathetic. He was the Green Lantern for over a decade, and in that time he never got a proper arch-enemy and barely fought anyone worth remembering now, and obviously no one worth trying to structure a novel around. Man, the 90’s really were a rough patch for comics.

So, Book One and Book Two of Sleepers were like night and day, and almost seem to like separate stand-alone novels except for a few provocatively connected bits. This is probably bad news; the trilogy started getting better, and also started showing signs that maybe, maybe there really is a thought-out master plan for the whole overarching story. Maybe Book Three will prove to be the keystone that provides logical context for everything I thought was so random and awful in the first two books (mostly Book One). Probably not! The odds are long. But I feel the spark of irrational exuberant optimism at this point, on the cusp of being fanned into a (green) flame. I don’t currently have a copy of Book Three, and it’s possible the feeling will pass before I manage to hunt one down, but either way I will bring things to a close as soon as I can.