The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert
Cover art by Paul Youll
Published byTor Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
Many years ago, in the days when you could still find a writer's backlist on the shelves of a bookstore (and not just a used-book store), I was looking at Frank Herbert's other works and came across this novel. At first glance, I read it as Saratoga Barrier, and the cover art on that edition -- which showed a road through the desert toward distant mountains, and a small town covered by a stereotypical science-fiction glass dome floating in the clouds above the road -- led me to expect something very different from the novel I actually found within those covers. Something more on the order of James Blish's Cities in Flight universe, perhaps of a town flying away into space or slipping into another dimension. Or maybe one that's covered itself in a literal dome to shut out the outside world, like the City of the Masters in John Christopher's The City of Gold and Lead.
Instead, I got a story that initially appeared to be more mainstream than science fiction. We have Gilbert Dasien, a psychologist from UC-Berkley, looking down into a valley which is the home of the small but strangely insular town of Santaroga. The people aren't hostile to outsiders -- in fact, they're impeccably polite in a gruff country way -- but they make it clear that those who pass through should move along. No one will rent a house or apartment to an outsider, and even the desk clerk at the hotel provides Dasien only the barest minimum of hospitality.
Of more concern is this town's stubborn resistance to participation in the larger national economy. Every effort by national and regional chains to open stores in this town has failed, for the simple reason that the locals refuse to shop there. Every store -- the gas station, the grocery store, you name it -- is locally owned and operated. And the mysterious Barrier seems to work both ways -- Santarogans rarely leave their town, and when they do, they rarely stay away for long. Part of it seems to be medical -- when away from their native valley, they have greatly increased incidences of allergies, which has been the primary reason their young men are invariably rejected for service by draft boards (one must remember that the novel was written in 1968, when the Vietnam War was still hungry for conscripts). But that's not the whole explanation. There's something else keeping these people close to home.
Dasien has been sent to Santaroga to find out why. He's the third investigator to go -- his two predecessors both died of accidents just peculiar enough that they leave people wondering, but not enough to attract the interest of a prosecutor -- and he has a personal connection with a young woman who lives here. They'd been dating, and he thought they had the chemistry to make a go of their relationship -- and then it stopped dead when Jenny insisted she couldn't live anywhere but her native valley.
That's something he's still stewing about while he eats in the hotel dining room. There's a bit of difficulty with the waiter about some items of food from the Jaspers Cheese Co-op, the local business which seems to be the hub of the entire community. And then the waiter tells the story of how he came to live in Santaroga, of abandoning New Orleans and just starting walking as if God Himself were guiding his steps. And then there's an outburst -- a traveling salesman, frustrated at the chilly reception he's getting, starts yelling and is told to leave by the local constable. As if in response to some inaudible signal, locals and travelers draw apart. Two families suddenly decide to be going, in spite of the late hour and the desolate land between Santaroga and the nearest town.
Uneasy, Dasien goes to his room, only to discover that his suitcase has been searched while he was eating, never mind the reassurance that no one would bother his baggage while he ate. It leads him to make a call to Berkeley, to his mentor Dr. Selador -- only to have it cut off. When he asks the operator what is wrong, he's gruffly told that the line leaving the valley is out, and there is no way to know when it will be repaired. At that moment he hears a hissing sound and discovers an old-fashioned gaslight, valve open but unlit.
After this narrow escape from something that might be an accident, but might also be an attempt on his life with plausible deniability, he keeps wondering just what is going on -- especially when he discovers that the local constable has made off with his briefcase. Given it contains all the information about his real reason for coming here, it could make things a whole lot worse.
Those thoughts are on his mind as he heads over to the Jaspers Cheese Co-op, intent on finding out just what its real role in this community might be. His first impression of the building is of a hive, to the point he imagines there must be a queen and larvae in there somewhere. His next is puzzlement at why it should be guarded by men with dogs, a measure that seems excessive for a food co-op. Inside, he gets glimpses of the layout of the complex, and then is told that the tour must be delayed.
But the biggest surprise is on the way out, when a door opens and beyond is an assembly line where dull-eyed people slog through packing boxes. A number of these people have their legs locked in stocks, as if they were being punished. Or if they were prone to wandering if not confined, since they give the impression of being mentally disturbed in one way or another.
All Dasien's interactions with the people of Santaroga have that weird feeling, simultaneously unutterably mundane and oddly out of kilter. If Frank Herbert's name weren't on the cover, tying it with all his various science fiction novels, it would be easy to think that we were reading a thriller about a town taken over by some creepy cult.
But it is a novel by Frank Herbert, written not long after Dune, his masterwork. And as both protagonist and reader will discover, it is also a novel about awareness-spectrum drugs, albeit in a contemporary setting, rather than in a future so distant that it could just as well be fantasy, complete with lords and ladies. In fact, the contemporary setting of Santaroga still feels oddly contemporary while we're reading it, even some five decades of technological change later. The story is so engrossing that we don't stop to wonder why Dasien brings a briefcase full of papers but no laptop, why he doesn't have a cellphone to call out of the valley.
As the story proceeds, he begins to focus on the nature of Jaspers, the mysterious substance that seems to be the focus of the town's culture. Some people seem to behave as if under the influence of a hallucinogen, perhaps LSD -- except that Jenny proved utterly immune to the effects of LSD during a trial at the psychology department where they'd worked together. Finally he secures himself a sample of Jaspers-infused food and sets forth to separate it out and analyze it -- and when he returns, finds himself oddly craving Jaspers, which leads him to a panicky sense that they are trapping him, making it impossible for him to ever leave the valley.
And there's all the accidents, all the close calls in which he comes terrifyingly close to getting killed. In one, he ends up saving one of the locals from a fire, at the cost of being badly burned himself.
There are some interesting parallels to Paul Maud'dib's exploration of the power of the melange spice to open the inner eye of prophecy -- particularly the scene where Dasien distills the Jaspers essence from a wheel of cheese and consumes it, which strongly echoes when Paul takes the spice essence and goes into a trance so long and so deep he hovers on the edge of death long enough for his adopted tribe to view him as dead and want to harvest his body's water.
However, Jaspers is not exactly equivalent to melange, even if they are both the products of biological processes that occur only in a very limited environment (and in a galaxy-spanning space opera, a single planet is as much a very limited environment as a single valley in an earthbound novel that is otherwise mimetic). Prescience is an obvious thing, and draws upon the desire to press back the veil of time and foresee the future, a longing which has been present since the dawn of humanity. But what Jaspers offers is far more subtle. It's not exactly telepathy or even psionic empathy a la Deanna Troi of Star Trek. It's more of a shift in the nature of consciousness and perception, such that a community functions in a fundamentally different way. And quite honestly, I'm not sure that it necessarily requires an appeal to the existence of psi powers, since it's known here in the Primary World that a great deal of interpersonal communication is not only non-verbal, but also operates at a level beneath the conscious mind.
Although The Santaroga Barrier isn't one of Frank Herbert's best-known books, it really deserves a closer look than it's received over the years. It covers a lot of the same themes we see in his more explicitly science fiction works, but presented in a way that is far more apt to be accessible to mundanes.
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Review posted April 12, 2012.
