Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19878 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-06
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Glen Duncan's I, Lucifer begins one steamy summer as some heavy negotiations are taking place in Heaven. God has decided to give Lucifer, the furthest-fallen of all fallen angels, a second chance. The Prince of Darkness can return to the fold, provided he manages to last one month on earth without sin. The human form chosen for this celestial experiment? A depressed novelist of little renown, currently contemplating suicide in his Clerkenwell garret.

Lucifer eagerly grasps the opportunity for a holiday on earth, and uses his host's identity to re-write the story of Creation in a format that has Hollywood moguls kissing his feet. It's not popular with Him Upstairs, of course, what with the Devil being portrayed as a maverick free-thinker and God as a humourless autocrat. But Lucifer's having too much fun to care. He's experiencing the pleasures of the flesh for the first time and everything - the odour of sweaty tube trains, cocaine, ice-cream, dirty sex--delights him. By the time the archangels are dispatched to bring him back, the Lord of all that's inhumane can't think of anything he'd rather be than human.

Lucifer befogs his audience, alternately spitting fury at them like some sulphur-charged Dennis Leary and then insisting that he's a nice guy, just misunderstood. What's clear, however, is that Glen Duncan is not merely one of those writers who can come up with amusing concepts. He's a sharp, sometimes savage observer of the human condition, whose talents are as many as the legions of Hell.--Matthew Baylis

Matthew Baylis
'Duncan is a sharp, sometimes savage observer of the human condition, whose talents are as many as the legions of Hell'

Independent
'Clever and challenging...sizzling with mephitic energy'

Customer Reviews

The best Glen Duncan work so far
I suppose I have to preface this review by saying that I am already a Glen Duncan fan, and have read all of his published novels save The Bloodstone Papers (on the reading list). At the point of my first reading of 'I, Lucifer', I had only read one other - 'Weathercock', which rocked my world and left me wanting more.

If 'Weathercock' ended up hovering around the top of my 'favourite reads' list, 'I, Lucifer' shot straight to first place. Where some of Duncan's books fall down is in the personality of the protagonist, frequently a young man musing on life after a catastrophic emotional event - they sometimes end up infuriating me with their whininess. Not so here. Lucifer has suffered, yes, has possibly been done wrong to, and yes, he complains about it; but his ultimate motive is to win over the reader, and so he narrates charmingly, persuasively and wittily.

Even while sympathising with the Devil, though, you are being shown his flaws. The more obvious ones he doesn't attempt to deny (namely, his urge to do evil), but there is more to him. This becomes more pronounced a subject towards the end of the book.

Glen Duncan's style is perhaps, as has been said, self-indulgent, but also wonderfully descriptive. He says exactly what he wants to say, sometimes in less, sometimes in more words. And what's more, what he's saying is often what a lot of us would rather ignore. He pinions human nature perfectly, using his fallen angel.

Good to Bad
The start of 'I, Lucifer' is, to be frank, very good. In fact, the brilliance of the beginning few dozen pages is the main reason I'm giving it three and not two stars. The opening of the novel suggests and promises that an original book looms within the ensuing pages. But then you read those pages...and you find yourself bitterly disappointed.

One of the biggest problems I have with it is that it rambles. The "plot" doesn't really go very far, and it just tells the same story that we all know in a very familiar way, which doesn't deliver on the unique stance promised by so many positive reviews. In fact, Lucifer himself continually apologises for digressing. In many ways, the whole novel could be summarised one big digression, but without a main concept present from which to digress.

This having been said, there are some very good aspects of the book. For one thing, the way Glen Duncan has written it makes it extremely readable, and also very funny at times. His characters are also extremely well-developed within a fairly short space of time, a hard feat given the novel's length.

In short, 'I, Lucifer' had the potential to be a brilliant novel, especially when you consider Glen Duncan's abilities as a writer. But the whole book simply leaves you with the overmastering feeling that something is missing from it, maybe because Duncan set himself a very narrow subject on which to base a novel, given the amount of literature already out there on the subject. The idea is brilliant, and the overall gloss of the novel is impressive. But it's only a good novel, not the great one it could have been.

Wrong end of the Devil's tail
I personally found I, Lucifer one of the most unsufferable reads I've ever had to subject myself too. And to think that it's being adapted for the big screen makes me shudder with anticipated dread. In total agreement with some of the comments here, Glen Duncan's prose, storyline and linguistic gimmicks all reveal an immature, self-conscious and most of all self-indulgent author, who would like to pass himself off as a British Bret Easton Ellis but only ever convinces as a wannabe. Christopher Fowler's mid 90's Spanky, which Mr Duncan very obviously drew his inspiration from for I, Lucifer, is altogether a smarter kind of read. Ignore the latter and embrace the former, that's my advice.