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| Another long book where.. Have we done this before? |
Trawling Twitter at dire o’clock in the afternoon
desperately, quixotically, searching for meaning and /or distraction I found a
tweet which told me that some author or other was giving his book away on the
Kindle-ma-bob. Usually, these tweets are from nasty Americans who taunt the UK
book-buying and /or downloading public
with novels that are not permitted to be sold to UK book-buyers and / or
downloaders (and probably aren’t worth the reading in any case). This one
seemed to be, genuinely, from a ‘real’ person (@BlueDoorBooks I think it was), with
the backing of the publishing house, having been shared by them. What? I follow
Harper Collins?! Why on earth… Oh yeah, to get free books.
So I downloaded it, via – shudder – Amazon Whispernet and
there it was on my bottom-of-the-range Kindle, for which enhanced audio content
is NOT AVAILABLE*. It begins well in the fractured, multi-narrative that has
become a little bit popular in the wake of Lost,
only in much shorter instalments. On matters of plot, there is what might be
likened to an M. Night Shamalamadingdong “happening” and a whole bunch of
people are very slowly telling the reader all about it. Some people experienced
The Broadcast or The Testimony (a bit of word play as one might consider the
narrative streams as the characters’ testimonies) and some didn’t. Some took it
stoically and some didn’t. Some turned to religion and some didn’t. And lots
and lots of people die. For many reasons. Which would spoil the surprise.
As it’s told in retrospect it quickly became clear that all
of our testifiers survived to testify (although to whom? How are we reading
this?), and it’s quite easy to spot who does die and who doesn’t so it’s not
much of a shock when they do. And the passages crawl by excruciatingly slowly
in places, so much so that it’s difficult not to jump ahead – if you do you are
very likely to miss crucial details or hints so try not to – with some
characters seemingly redundant and having no purpose (like the single
appearance of the Iranian school teacher, the Chinese gamer, and the Indian
doctor who appears heavily early on but feels superfluous except to add
cultural ballast). It’s an overly long, predictable story, but one that has
been very well realised, and it kept my eyes drifting back to the Kindle when I
should have been meditating or would otherwise be playing online poker. That
the author reads or has read lots of Stephen King (gargh!**) is clear, given
the death toll, but at least there are no aliens, and no convenient and
plausible explanation is given for The Broadcast. The casual throw-away line
about project Orpheus – no spoilers
here – as the cause of so many unexplained deaths is vaguely annoying but I
suppose if that particular mystery hadn’t been resolved it would have been a
zero-for-god-knows-how-many mystery resolution count. As it is, the supposedly
unsatisfactory leaving of loose ends is
strangely satisfying, and concludes what is otherwise an entertaining and
enjoyable feat of multiple ventriloquisms.
As publisher-driven e-book freebies go, it certainly did its
job, in so far as I ended up buying one of the author’s other novels, The Explorer (available from all good
etc. and also on his website)
for the handsome sum of three Great British Pounds and ninety-nine Great
British Pence. This has now gone somewhere near to the top of my virtual
to-read pile, behind Michael Chabon’s Telegraph
Road and Freaks by Caroline
Smailes et al. And Don Quixote. And
Plato’s The Republic, The Unbearable Lightness of Being A Prawn Cracker
by Will Self, and at least two of (@craigstone_) Craig Stone’s rather random
novel-type things. So not very near the
top. But as a Welsh author of note (I’m assuming he’s from Wales given the
accolade Wales Book of the Year – Fiction
which he won for this self same book, and his inclusion in the Parthian anthology of new Welsh
writing, Nu)
I feel honour bound to do him the courtesy of highlighting my good
intentions to read his stuff at some point. In that respect he’s in esteemed
company.
*Therein lies a tale which is so boring as to render it less
interesting than this footnote.
**Refer to introduction to my review of The
Twelve by Justin Cronin; I also conclude he’s read lots of Stephen King
because he wrote a Guardian
book blog about it…
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