Joe Taylor is a prolific fiction writer, with several volumes of short stories and several novels. An experimenter, writing to please himself, usually: one of his novels is in verse. Taylor is also a philosopher, so his fiction, as in “Silent Bob,” is fantastical, and serious—at the same time.
This short novel takes up the eternal question of free will: do we have any? Are we destined to behave as we do because of our inherited nature or the experiences we have during our lives? Or both? Or neither? Perhaps there is a divine, supernatural force which guides our every decision. Call it destiny or god or in this case Silent Bob.
This novel follows the lives of a fairly normal couple in Lexington, Kentucky. Rainey and BJ, almost alone among their peers, can actually see the creatures who live on the rooftops. These are the viziers, and the premise here is that a vizier—the word means a high-level executive officer, usually in the old Ottoman Empire—lives on the roof of the house, usually one vizier to a house, and through mind control, telepathy and the mysterious administering of hormones, controls the decisions of the humans, called by them “syrup units,” below.
We follow BJ and Rainey from childhood for fifty years. At first, it seems the vizier named Tiny T does control them. Tiny T tells BJ to climb over a high fence to get black walnuts. BJ tries, fails, gets caught, tears up his arm. Tiny T, like all viziers, thrives on the emotions of his syrup units. He delights in moving them around like robots, puppets, pawns. The viziers seem to be especially responsible for Rainey’s and others’ powerful sexual desires.
But finally, who can tell? Are the god-like creatures deceiving themselves? Might humans be behaving and misbehaving in the same ways regardless? Not that they have free will., mind you, but that they are controlled by their OWN genes, chemicals and psychological needs. Either way, they/we have no freedom.
We follow BJ and Rainey from 1970, the time of the Kent State killings, through the COVID-19 pandemic. Along the way, there was the Oklahoma City bombing, Chernobyl, the Challenger disaster. There are references to Hiroshima. Do the viziers deserve credit for all this? It is thought in vizier history that they invented the idea of divine monarchy, indeed the idea of religion, which has caused so much bloodshed. Viziers have even thought they were themselves divine. Is the head vizier, known as The Fat One, God? If so, is he the embodiment of both good and evil, the Manichean heresy?
Taylor ends with a letter from The Fat One. He laments: the syrup units have now invented a machine so powerful it will provide “instant gratification beyond booze and drugs, beyond television, beyond sex.” The Internet. The viziers may retire: they have no work left to do.
