THE GLASS HAMMER by K W Jeter (Grafton £2.95 pp238)

This is a book about the power of television to affect society and individuals. The Glass Hammer of the title must refer to the impact of the crystal screen. Large parts of it are written as a shooting script:

"VIDEO: CUT to INTERIOR: a dark cramped space,

the LA glare spilling down a wooden

stairway from above. PULL BACK as

SCHUYLER and WYRE descend"

I could learn a lot about writing my own first script from this book. I could learn a lot about writing a novel based on my reading this novel. I could learn to avoid everything it does.

It fails because of its pretensions - at the same time it is a novel about the damage done by the media, about religious revival, about life after the next nuclear (star) war, and it is a chase story. Colin Wilson in one of his early novels has a character he says is like Aleister Crowley when the character clearly is Crowley. Similarly The Glass Hammer has an early reference to the film Vanishing Point, but this book's chase, with its driver and Amf computer aid are only Dean Jagger and the black radio DJ recast, not new.

The story is not told sequentially but it is something like this - the US has split into civilisations on either coast after devastating war, and most people in North America rely for support on the Church. Schuyler is excommunicated and starts to make a living racing across the desert with bootleg computer chips, shot at by leftover star wars satellites. Television broadcasts make him a hero in the slums of South America. He becomes a God to the new peons and his son a likely new Messiah. A breed of chaste nuns opposed to the Messiah's re-appearance, since they do not want him to die again, struggle against Schuyler but they have nothing to worry about as the novel ends. Which conclusion feels rather as if the author's tape had run out.

The Glass Hammer fails, finally, because of its overload. Its style and its story are too much for the book to carry (it does not have the ampage and burns out). The Messiah in the slums particularly misfires. Why they should come to believe in him is never explained.