Book Review: Song of Kali by Dan Simmons

As long-time readers of this site know, we love Dan Simmons around here. The author of The Terror and Drood and the Ilium/Olympos novels (and, unfortunately, Flashback, but still!), Simmons writes long, detailed, and intensely engaging novels that never seem to make complete sense at the end but can be forgiven because the journey was so incredible.

However, there's one major difference when it comes to Song of Kali - it's not long.

I need to mention that because I picked this novel up in the heart of the Christmas season - in reading this I had to put aside a book a Christmas horror stories (note: I may also have been too a-scared for the horror anthology, but nothing has been confirmed). This book has been on my wish-list for a while, and I figured this was a good time to pick it up since we're taking a trip to Disneyland in mid-January.

(Note: Do you get the Disneyland connection? Okay, I'll give you a minute.

---------------

Did you get it yet? No? Okay, I'll hold.

---------------

Anything yet? You want me to tell you? Okay, it's below:

KALI-MAAAAA!!!!!! That's right - it's because Disneyland has an Indiana Jones ride, which looks like it was based on Temple of Doom, and that had the Kali worshippers, and this has "Kali" right in the title, and...and...this is just how my brain works.)

So, knowing that most Simmons books take at least a month to read and often even more than two, I picked up the book on my Kindle and started reading it, thinking I would be reading it through our January trip. Instead, it lasted about a week and a half. (Note: This is one of the drawbacks to reading books electronically - I never have any idea how long/hefty a book is until I start reading a few pages and watch the percentages move on the bottom).

So, when I realized this was a short book, why didn't I put it aside? Because it was so fascinating!

While this might have only been a quarter of the size of a standard Simmons book, it lives up to his best work - engaging, strange, quick-moving, and very detailed. This book, set in the 70s, follows a magazine writer who takes his wife and newborn daughter with him to Calcutta to investigate an Indian poet who seemed to have risen from the dead (note: this sounds like EXACTLY the type of situation where you would rather leave your wife and newborn daughter at home; of course, the characters had no idea they were part of a Dan Simmons book!). Simmons weaves together themes of Indian literature and independence, Kali worship, Calcutta gang life, and the general messiness of city life in a fascinating story where things are foreshadowed way in advance, things happen for seemingly no reason story-wise, tons of loose ends are left at the end, and you STILL feel like you read a great book. That's the Dan Simmons effect.

One thing to note: This book was written in the mid-80s, and as I was searching for the cover picture to use up above (pretty snazzy I must say), I saw some threads about whether this book is racist or not. Look, it is pretty hard on Calcutta, mentioning the dirt, the smell, the people lying in the street destitute and possibly dead. What I will say is that I don't know a ton about Calcutta, but anything that I have seen looks exactly like that. I'm sure there are good things that could be said about Calcutta - I just don't know any of them.

Anyway, this was a very fun read, and if you've never read a Dan Simmons book before, the relative brevity of this novel makes this a great entry point. Recommended - eight out of ten hot dogs!