It's a classic, they all said, and I'm not going to argue with Ursula LeGuin whose glowing praise is reproduced on the back cover. If you read it, she promises, you will be changed, and true enough I have indeed been transformed from a person who hadn't read Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch into a person who has. It's one of those science-fiction novels which doubles up as literary fiction and which can therefore be mentioned in polite circles without it seeming like you've asked Brian Sewell about his favourite Star Wars sequel.
It's all allegory, arguably satirical, as implied by the lengthy quote from The Pilgrim's Progress at the beginning. It's the diary of a man imprisoned and pumped full of Pallidine, a variant form of syphillis which dramatically increases the subject's intelligence to genius level while reducing life expectancy to something under a year. The allegory seems to amount to look how intelligent we've become, and yet we've used our intelligence to build nuclear weapons, but can be further distilled to a variant on that whole Garden of Eden deal with the snake and the apple. It's fair enough as messages go and not without value, but the novel doesn't seem to do a whole lot else, or even a whole lot of anything so far as I was able to follow. That said, snowed under with doubtless clever references to Thomas Aquinas, Heidegger, and others, I found much of it difficult to follow in so far as that there didn't seem to be any good reason to do so. It may be redundant to describe Camp Concentration as self-indulgent given Disch having freely admitted to writing for his own pleasure, and self-indulgence doesn't usually bother me, being preferable to the cynical button pushing of bland populism; but God this was joyless and so fucking boring.
