From the Bookshelf of On Paths Unknown…

Finch (Ambergris, #3)

Jeff VanderMeer

Start date: June 18, 2022

Discussion: CITY OF SAINTS & MADMEN

Find A Copy At

Libraries

Group Discussions About This Book

Showing 2 of 8 topics — 159 comments total

CITY OF SAINTS & MADMEN

Intertextual references in COSAM
By Traveller · 17 posts · 35 views

last updated Nov 23, 2015 08:51AM

The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris
By Traveller · 3 posts · 24 views

last updated Nov 17, 2015 08:41AM

showing 1 of 1 topics view all »

What Members Thought

Jun 11, 2024 Traveller rated it liked it

Shelves: three-and-a-half-stars, dystopia-utopia, urban-fantasy, experimental

Three and a half stars.

A slight let-down compared to the spectacular other works in the Ambergris universe, although I enjoyed the increased pace, as narrated in a breathless Hard-boiled Noir style well enough. The story has enough meat, potatoes, herbs, and spices to make it a satisfying meal, although the ending felt like it needed more resolution and denouement and made me feel as if I had suddenly been plonked high up on the beach by a huge wave, only to have all of the action suddenly disa ...more

13 likes · Like · see review

Jun 16, 2016 Brad rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fantasy-urban-fantasy, about-lies, detective, exceeded-my-expectations, kept-me-up-at-night, read-in-2016, about-imagination, paused, goodreads-author, about-madness

It took me nearly three years to get through Finch.

I picked it up the first time, got started and found myself stopping for what, at the time, was an inexplicable reason. I had already read and loved both City of Saints and Madmen & Shriek: An Afterword. The former for its insane originality and the latter for the way it appealed to my post-modern academic self. But I couldn't break ground in Finch, so I put it down and thought I'd take another crack later.

I don't know how much later I started ...more

5 likes · Like · see review

Jul 13, 2021 Kate Sherrod rated it really liked it

Shelves: audio-reads

Combining a bog standard noir plot and hero with the baroque bizarrity of Ambergris is a fairly obvious move -- the city is always a character in noir, and Ambergris has a lot of character-- but turning it into a war story AND an alien invasion story AND a critique of colonialism isn't. That's what Vandermeer has done here, and with considerable success. Finch can stand alone though reading it is much enriched by prior acquaintance with one of the dueling unreliable narrators of Shriek: An After Combining a bog standard noir plot and hero with the baroque bizarrity of Ambergris is a fairly obvious move -- the city is always a character in noir, and Ambergris has a lot of character-- but turning it into a war story AND an alien invasion story AND a critique of colonialism isn't. That's what Vandermeer has done here, and with considerable success. Finch can stand alone though reading it is much enriched by prior acquaintance with one of the dueling unreliable narrators of Shriek: An Afterword, who is still stirring things up over a hundred years since he and his sister disappeared in the middle of what turned out to be only the first War of the Houses. Shriek and his strange fate are tied to the case our new hero, reluctant police detective John Finch, is set to solve by his Grey Cap boss -- what's that? A Grey Cap bossing the cops around? Well, yes. Between Shriek's time and Finch's was an event called The Rising, in which the Grey Caps erupted from their city beneath Ambergris (from where they'd been manipulating the over city subtly via spores and phytochemicals and infiltration of infrastructure for centuries) and conquered Ambergris. Grey Caps are the bosses everywhere, and humans are either their willing subordinates or are herded into work camps wherein they are set to building enormous and bizarre new structures of unknown purpose that dominate the city's landscape long before they're even completed. In the midst of all of this, Finch, his partner White (who is undergoing weird fungal metamorphoses very similar to those once experienced by one Duncan Shriek) and an icky "Partial" (whose biology has been hacked to turn him into a walking recording device for the Grey Caps) catch an apparent locked room double murder with no witnesses and no clues who the victims even are. Until the Grey Caps force feed them with some clues that lead to a sort of solution to the case, but crack open a city-sized can of very weird worms that makes the original murder mystery look about as mysterious as a slightly smudged grocery list. And then things get really weird.

Again, I read this in audio form, with narrator Oliver Wyman taking over for Bronson Pinchot, to terrific effect. Wyman sounds like a gumshoe even when he's speaking in complete sentences (more about that in a moment) and doesn't go overboard in trying to sound feminine when voicing the dialogue of the novel's female characters, i.e. he doesn't try to pitch his voice higher or get all breathy the way a lot of male narrators tend to; it's more a subtle shift in speech patterns, and THAT'S THE WAY TO DO IT.

But about these sentences. Boy did Vandermeer go overboard in a particular kind of detective story vernacular here. I'm talking about that artificial gumshoe tendency to drop the subject from sentences, usually but not only to describe a series of actions like... "Got up. Made the bed. Put on slippers. Went to bathroom. Brushed his teeth. Combed his hair. Had existential thoughts between spits." A little of that, especially in rapid fire sequence like what I've just made up here, goes a long way, but there's a lot more than a little of it in Finch. Vandermeer is careful enough with it to keep the reader from getting confused about who is brushing whose teeth by adding a subject to a sentence whenever the action changes subject, but there's still too much of it here.

I might not have noticed this so much in print, but in audio form with the perfect noir narrator, it was inescapable and got annoying.

But then again, I've read a lot more noir-mashed-up-with-other-genres than usual lately, so maybe it's a cumulative effect? Except I don't recall Jeff Noon doing it at all.

Anyway, this was a great wrap-up to a great series, and yes, you do get satisfying explanations for most of the weird stuff and resolutions to most of the mysteries, with just enough left unanswered to let you enjoy a little speculating on your own.

Applause. ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Oct 19, 2015 Amy (Other Amy) rated it it was ok

Shelves: pop-sugar-me, they-burned-what, the-world-adores-and-i-do-not, library-i-love-you, 2-stars-just-ok, close-encounters, 2015, need-to-reread, on-a-quest, to-review

Um, yeah. Disappointed. I think I owe this one a reread before I actually call it done, though. I'm kind of hoping that rating will go up after I have time to let this percolate a bit.

(The good news is that you don't need this book to enjoy City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword, the books before it in the series. And nothing in Finch tarnishes the story in those. So I still highly, highly recommend them.) ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Oct 23, 2020 Jonathan Eisen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

All of the books in the Ambergris trilogy are very different in both scope and style. While City of Saints and Madmen (the first) features the largest scope, contains the most ornate prose, and leaves the most questions, "Finch" is limited to the perspective of a single detective, utilizes the rough, staccato prose of a noir novel ("Finch" IS a noir novel), and ironically, answers the most questions. ...more

Like · see review