The Physiognomy

Cley is Physiognomist First Class in the Well-Built City, capital of a country ruled by Master Drachton Below. Physiognomy there is an exact science: measure a person's forehead, cheekbones and chin, and you know their moral character and their future, so the physiognomist decides who is guilty and who is not. Cley is proud, humorless, rigid and addicted to a drug called sheer beauty. Below sends him to the remote mining town of Anamasobia, where miners digging blue spire are slowly turning into blue statues, and where the miners have found a living mummy they call the Traveler, holding a white fruit believed to grant immortality. The fruit has been stolen, and Cley is to find the thief by reading the faces of the townspeople.

Things go badly and then terribly. Cley is drawn to Arla, a bright young woman of the town, and in a delirium of withdrawal he tries to improve her character by cutting her face to his principles. Below's troops then slaughter the townspeople and carry off Arla, the Traveler and the fruit, and Cley is condemned to the sulfur mines. Later he is pardoned, deliberately addicted again and brought back to the city, where Below, who has eaten the fruit, suffers headaches so violent that they set off explosions. Cley, who has begun to see what his science really is, turns against his master to save Arla and the Traveler, and the book ends with the destruction of the Well-Built City.

Ford's dark comedy is sharpest in the opening chapters, where Cley's vanity is on full display. The book is short and grows stranger as it goes; some readers find the later chapters a run of hallucinations in which it is hard to tell what is really happening. Kirkus called it "seriously, logically, stunningly surreal." Publishers Weekly was cooler, finding its inventions too whimsical to frighten. Readers who enjoy Mervyn Peake, or fantasy at its oddest, will find it rewarding.