Not until Plath is out of the tree and headed further into Hell does the story really pick up, and then gets even more badly bogged down in the complexities of papal encyclicals.

But the back story device isn't successful the dialog with Plath is much more interesting than Carpenter's earlier fumblings. Nice irony, especially if you've read Plath's poetry. The first half of the novel has Carpenter tell the story of his failures to Plath. And the tree turns out to hold the spirit of Sylvia Plath. The despairing would-be rescuer of souls reclines on the roots of a tree in the Wood of Suicides. In the overwrought title, 'Escape from Hell,' Niven and Pournelle revisit Alan Carpenter as he tries to put into effect the ideas he developed in 'Inferno.' They don't involve any escape from Hell quite the opposite.Īgain, the novel has its moments. There was no need for a sequel.īut go back we did. The novel was a complete work there was no real need to go back. You know, 'Inferno on $5 A Day.' But the novel also had some excellent moments, including the apparent ramblings of a mad psychiatrist, who turned out to understand the real purpose of Hell, or at least of Niven's modern Inferno. In some ways, it also represented Niven's lamentable descent into travelogue instead of plot. 'Inferno' was interesting, but not great. Carpenter's guide was, well, that's a surprise, but let's just say he was Italian also.

Dante's guide was Virgil, the great Roman poet. instead of Dante, the narrator was the fictional Alan Carpentier, nee Carpenter, a pedestrian science fiction writer. In 1976, Niven and Pournelle published their 'Inferno,' a modern re-working of the first book of Dante's opus. And demonstrated to me that the first book of 'The Divine Comedy,' 'Inferno,' was by far the most interesting. Those engravings were dark, gruesome and vivid they were fascinating to a teenager, and sucked me in to Dante's great work. My parents had a 1948 edition of the White translation of Dante's 'The Divine Comedy,' the one with the Doré engravings.

Escape from hell niven