#15: The Physiognomy

Ford, Jeffrey: The Physiognomy. New York: Avon Books, 1997. Print. 218 pages.
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SETTING: The Well-Built City, a world ruled by a merciless man, called The Master, who believes it is appropriate to exterminate people based on their physiognomies in order to create a utopia.  
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SUMMARY: Physiognomist Cley uses his observations and measurements of people's physical features (i.e. eye color, width of the bridge of the nose, length of the great toe nail, whether or not a mole has a long strand of hair on it... I can keep going but for brevity's sake, I'll stop here.) to assess their characters and then use that information to kill or imprison the characteristically impure members of that world in order to stop them from marring it.
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FAVORITE QUOTE: "'It doesn't matter what we were, Cley.  I was no innocent; none of us were.  We will head for paradise.  There is no room for hatred there.'" - Chapter 13, page 89.
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Although I'm from Southern California, I have a love for the Bay Area that Los Angeles can never hope to compete with.  I had to visit San Francisco and Berkeley one last time before leaving for the East Coast, and during that week long trip I headed to Moe's Bookstore, one of Berkeley's biggest used book stores.  Not only is Moe's full of used books, but it has FOUR FLOORS of used books!  (For those who don't know or don't remember, I prefer used over new books because used books have so much more character and history.)  It's been a few months now since I bought this book at Moe's, but I somehow forgot about it.  Oops!  It was a completely random pick too, chosen because I liked the title.  And, hoooooooly crap!  This is by far the weirdest book I have ever read.  EVAR.
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Things I liked about this book:

1. A whole lot goes on in a little more than 200 pages.  It's quite impressive.
2. It's so bizarre!!  The author definitely has some strange things going on upstairs, but it's undoubtedly brilliant.
3. The protagonist's arrogance is literally smacked out of him after about the first quarter of the book.  I wish this was a more common occurrence in reality... there are way too many arrogant people out there who are not nearly as awesome as they think they are.
4. The sulphur mine workers eventually turn into sulphur statues.  The explanation goes as follows: they spend so much of their lives exposed to the sulphur dust that it mixes with their biology, eventually taking over and solidifying the former mine worker into a statue.  Somewhat parallel to what mine workers, throughout history and in present time, experience(d), no?  They spend their adult lives working in the mines, only to die of some, usually respiratory-related, illness for which their exposures to dust and toxins in the mines were the direct cause.
5. The protagonist's arrogance leads him to botch a plastic surgery on the woman he is in love with. Her face is so damaged that anyone who looks at her is instantly killed.  Great example of how carelessness and arrogance can have serious consequences.  If you haven't picked up on it yet, I can't stand arrogant people!

Things I didn't like about this book and/or found strange:

1. Loads of violence and gruesome torture methods are used throughout the entire book.
2. The characters in this book use an opiate called "sheer beauty."  It is used intravenously, which led me to conclude that it is probably something along the lines of heroine.  What was really disconcerting was that the protagonist feels the need to use it while doing procedures because (a) he's addicted and (b) he thinks it enhances his performance as a physiognomist.  
3. The author could have done a lot more with this story.  It seemed like it was only half developed.  Perhaps he was going for that, but I would have enjoyed it more if it had a stronger story line.

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Again, this was such a strange book!  There were some amusing parts that made me smirk, but it was otherwise just one weird occurrence after another.  I won't go so far as saying it was a waste of a read, because there is rarely such a thing (I can't say never because I have read some books that felt like a waste of time (case in point: the second and third Hunger Games)).  However, the history behind physiognomy and its use in the past to assess character is very interesting.  In all honesty, I think I had more fun researching the history of physiognomy than reading the book, but its the book that inspired me to conduct the research, so for that I'm grateful.
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Recommend?  No.  But yes if really weird dystopias are your cup of tea.