| |
read in March, 2008
Robotkarateman said:
"First, let me begin by saying I'm a Gibson fan-boy. Neuromancer is a book I've read at least once a year since first discovering it. It's got all of the elements of a classic adventure story, and it's hung with incredibly predictive science fiction t...more
First, let me begin by saying I'm a Gibson fan-boy. Neuromancer is a book I've read at least once a year since first discovering it. It's got all of the elements of a classic adventure story, and it's hung with incredibly predictive science fiction trappings which appeal to my geekier side.
So, having become so attached to Gibson's earlier work, it's difficult for me to say that his later books have become increasingly disorganized and less interesting. I first noticed this trend in "Idoru", the second book in the Bridge trilogy (it might be telling that I didn't identify "Idoru" as the second in the series until refreshing my memory of the book at Wikipedia). "Idoru" follows several characters as they encroach, however peripherally, on a central story unfolding behind the scenes. Each character filters events in their own way and sees only small portions of the larger picture. In the end, however, all of the main characters are drawn directly into the center of the action and the story resolves quite nicely, with Gibson tying in a few deftly crafted subplots for extra gestalt.
Gibson's subsequent books have followed the same multi-character multi-storyline structure with increasingly disparate results. Where "Idoru" succeeds in bringing closure to each character's portion of an over-all quest, "Spook Country" succeeds only in bringing each character to the end of the book. There is very little evolution to the overall story, and the characters seem set dressing to an author's conclusion which is all but lost by the final page.
Is this a book about the evils of the Iraq war? The cargo container that looms in the background of the story seems to be the sort of smoking gun an author making a point about corruption would use, but it arrives so late in the story, and its implications are explained in such an offhand manner, that any evils-of-war subtext comes across as an afterthought.
Perhaps, instead, this yet another Gibson story about the government's failure to control emerging technologies? The use of steganography to secret away information on files transported via iPod certainly hints at that, but once the iPod in the book is dropped and broken Gibson himself drops that line of thought.
In the end, "Spook Country" feels less like a separate book with its own message and more like a snippets of "Pattern Recognition" which Gibson refused to abandon. Unfortunately for us, in his haste to present these ideas he found so compelling, Gibson forgot to craft an interesting and coherent story line around them. And that is, in the end, what we really want from fiction.
As a fan, I hope "Spook Country" is an intermediary in a much larger series. As a stand-alone story, I found it lacking. ...less
"
|
| |
read in February, 2008, has a copy to sell/swap
Robotkarateman said:
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
"Lost Things" centers on David, a boy whose mother dies and whose father remarries and has a second child, leaving David to bicker bitterly with his new stepmother while trying to avoid anxiety attacks that leave him blacked out and feverish. And that groundwork occurs in one of the most poorly paced info-dumps I've had the misfortune to read. The first chapter focuses on David and his mother, leading you to believe this will be the crux of the story - but alas, she dies. The second chapter focuses on the father's remarriage and David's anxiety attacks leading the reader to believe, perhaps, this is the focus of the story - it is not. The third and fourth chapters center on David's mostly absent father whose work is "top secret" and David's fights with his step-mother and we, the audience, raise our index fingers and say, "Ah-ha! Top secret Dad! Conflict with the new parental figure! This, surely, is the story!" But, alas, those are red-herrings as well. In fact, after the sixth chapter, neither of those characters appears again until the (two chapters long!) epilogue.
The real story ends up being David's abduction into the land of fairy tales by the Crooked Man, a Rumpelstiltskin who makes vicious bargains with emotional children to feed his magical slave house. David starts off his true adventure by following the voice of his dead mother - but don't assume that the story somehow involves David's mother's spirit wandering painfully in the fantasy realm awaiting rescue, this too, in Connolly fashion, is completely irrelevant to the story. Instead, David wanders the fantasy realm accompanied by a series of nearly identical substitute fathers who end up betraying David's trust in one way or another - by being gay in one case (Roland), by being fallible in another (the generic Woodsman).
In the end, David finds another potential father figure in Jonathon, and quickly realizes that not only is Jonathon a liar and a murderer, but also that he, David, no longer needs a father figure because he's now become a man of his own right. He then stares down Jonathon, the Crooked Man, and the vicious wolf monsters, who until that point only appeared in the story when Connolly felt the need to remind us that David was in danger because wolf monsters were chasing him; they never catch up to him except at the end and, as I said, David simply stares them down and wins by virtue of his newfound manhood.
In all, "Lost Things" is a plodding, thinly veiled paean to a baby-boomer-era view of "manhood" as stoic resolution and resistance to all hurts, including mental and emotional. Perhaps this story plays better, and I don't wish to be insulting, with a female audience, one that's never had to grapple with questions of "manliness" or had to decide on an appropriate level of attachment to an older male. As for me, I was insulted that David begins the story emotionally wounded by what he views as a betrayal by his father and, instead of finding closure, he learns to just get over it and "be a man" about it.
But a bigger insult, in my eyes, was the closing of the book - Connolly is so in love with his work that he follows up the main story with almost 150 pages of notes and commentary on his story: everything from the origins of the fairy tales he parodies to his woeful recollections of scenes that were cut from the final draft (murder your darlings, Connolly!). It's as jarring as it would be had Stephen King ended Christine with detailed descriptions of a Plymouth Belvedere and ten pages of him crying about the Arnie/Christine tailpipe sex scene that his editors excised from the final publication.
This was my first experience with Connolly, and as it's his most highly recommended book, I'll probably pass on his work in the future. ...less
"
|
