So weak are his transitions, that, for example, his narrator constantly has to break in and say: "no one could have expected the following denoument," or "but I need to elaborate on this minor character." That really gets tiresome after a while. His confused plot stucture has the very annoying effect of introducing major changes in the characters at exactly the moment that you have forgotten all about them, viz, the penultimate chapter that concerns the important revelation of a figure who hasn't been mentioned for about 200 pages.

The book itself--structured so to speak around a political murder--moves like a snail hitched to a team of other, slower snails. The murder doesn't happen until after about 500 painful pages. The entire first part, some 200 pages, can be entirely skipped without any serious loss of comprehension.

Reactionaries like this book because it pokes fun at forerunners of the Russian revolution. I'm sure that there were lots of whackos involved in the whole affair and its aftermath. But all I can see that the author does is ridicule the nihilists. Yet some very well respected philosophers were nihilists, and, golly, the revolution must have been about something more than just murder and mayhem. (Wasn't Tzarist oppression at least a little part of it?)

Unlike the author's other (badly written) books like the Idiot and Crime and Punishment, this one even lacks the sort of transcendent moments of philosophical dialogue. These epiphanies (unlike Joyce's) take place in dialoges and are like the revelations one gets during a seizure (Dostovesky was an epileptic)--the conversations that Raskolnikov has with Sophia and the Prince Myshkin are examples. Personally, I ultimately didn't find those infrequent passages profound enough to make it worth trodging through C & P and the Idiot, but it was a close call. However Demons doesn't even give you those wonderful experiences--just a straight ahead unpolished rant.

The best thing about this book is the wonderful cover that graces the Vintage edition. It's a woodcut from Lynd Ward's God's Man. It's appropriate because one of the many themes that gets garbled amid the novel's 714 pages is the struggle between humans and demonic ideas. If you want to read an interesting take on a man being haunted by demons, read God's Man by all means, and not this jumbled "classic."