How did this writer go so wrong?

Blue Light By Walter Mosley. Little, Brown. $24.Wait a minute! If a person is covered head to toe with seriouslyinfected burns, how can doctors put him in a straitjacket for weeksat a time and expect him to go on living? This is a question thatcomes up three pages from the end of this story, but by that time thereader is so tired of asking questions about internal consistencythat it's pointless. If Walter Mosley wants, for instance, acharacter named Juan Thrombone to haul huge prehistoric stone potsdown to a ghost town in the northern California woods, using teams ofsupernaturally tamed bears, when everyone could just as easily beusing ordinary pots and pans to cook in, why not? More to the point,who cares?

People who love Mosley are going to have their affections sorelystrained. Mosley, whose Easy Rawlins detective mystery series hasgained a large and respectful following, has decided to go into whathe must think of as science fiction. The book jacket here reportsominously that Blue Light is only "the prelude to a projectedtrilogy," so I guess that means we won't be seeing Easy for a while.It's a shame.

It's not that Mosley should limit himself to the detectivegenre. Indeed, he's already written literary fiction and done wellwith it. But Blue Light is terribly disappointing. In fact, it'sderivative, solemn and frightfully dull, a mishmash of old"Highlander" episodes (does anyone still watch that long-runningsyndicated television series?) that leaves you shaking your head.Can this even be the same man whose prose used to be as easy-seemingas his detective's name?The time is the '60s, the place Berkeley and most of northernCalifornia. A shower of shining blue lights comes zooming in from anunknown location in the universe, and wherever they land theytransform their unwitting targets into themselves, only more so. Forexample, an intelligent young woman named Nesta becomes theRepository of All Intelligence. A sexy young woman named Claudiabecomes the Goddess of All Sex, and the scenes that follow from that(with barely clad semi-comatose love slaves standing at the ready toslake Claudia's unslakable desires) are pretty dopey andembarrassing.We must not forget the feckless hippie con man standing aroundin a park who gets hit by the blue light and turns into the prophetOrde. His insights turn into generic, acid perceptions of the '60s(except that Ralph Waldo Emerson had already covered much of the samematerial in his 19th century essay about the Oversoul, and Miguel deUnamuno has also gone on at some length about sentient trees in TheTragic Sense of Life).So it isn't exactly new knowledge that Orde is challenging: Thewhole planet is alive, animals have brains and souls, and trees aresinging to us all the time, except that generally speaking we're toodead and spiritually unconscious to pick up the message. (In aparticularly unsolicitous phrase, Mosley's narrator refers to giantsequoias that have been hit by blue light as "bellowing trees," sothat even the forest here manages to be loud and irritating.)If anything hit by the light becomes like itself only more so,it follows that there's going to be a spirit out there inhabiting abody that just happens to be dying when the blue light comes and thatspirit turns out to be Gray Man, the fiendish embodiment of death.And just as in "Highlander," when these People of Increased Capacitymeet each other, good comes up against evil one more time and thesepeople must do their dead-level best to whack each other.Naturally, Gray Man does very well in these encounters allthrough the book, because it is pretty hard to kill death, especiallyif you use only guns and sticks and axes and headlocks. Death isalready dead, and obviously these weapons aren't going to faze him.You'd think that might occur to some of these People of IncreasedCapacity, but they're too busy staging sex orgies and drinking eachother's blood in Part 2, and by Part 3 they're all out in the woodsmaking clothes out of mashed-up pine needles and hauling stone potsaround.Those who get hit straight on by the light are called "Blues";those who have been only indirectly affected are referred to asHalf-Lights, and this story is told by a Half-Light, a man of mixedblood called Chance, who, since this is more of an allegory thanscience fiction, is soon referred to as Last Chance - just as abeautiful young girl is called Julia at first, then Alacrity, thenFirst-Light.Even in his earlier life, Chance has been conflicted because ofhis black father, who deserted the family, and his white mother, whomhe can't seem to care about. He's been severely tempted by the ideaof suicide, and for the first half of the book is at least as closeto death as he is to life. (Surely it's important in this narrativethat death is referred to as Gray Man when he could have been calledanything else, anything but what results when you combine the colorsblack and white.)There are many other characters, named Preeta and Allitar andTrini and Winch. They all thrash around affected in one way oranother by the blue light. It's never made clear if the bears havebeen hit by that light, but a flock of California monarch butterflieshas been zapped, and they flap through the landscape sporting 2-footwingspans. By the end, Gray Man comes prowling around, and the Bluesall engage in a last, awkwardly described fight where they doeverything but hit him with their pocketbooks. Do you really thinkthat's going to faze Gray Man?Remember all the wit, humor and irony, the effortlesscharacterization and plot and prose style that characterized the EasyRawlins stories? You won't find any of that here in "Blue Light."It's understandable that Mosley might not want to end up as theAfrican American Sue Grafton, enslaved by a fictional detective -however amiable - trapped in a genre that he may have outgrown. Butwhen I think of that "projected trilogy," my heart sinks. He's waytoo good a writer to do that to himself, or us.