Desolation Review

Hi,

So a few weeks ago, shadesong was reading Desolation Road by Ian McDonald.

"Hey, I've seen that, it looks neat," I said.

"It's pretty good, I'll let you borrow it when I'm done," said shadesong

And she finished it and gave it to me and now I've read it.

It was sort of a unique experience...most books I read don't come with strands of shadesong's hair in them. :)

Beyond that, Desolation Road is the fever dream tale of a martian community's rise and fall. It's very much a Western in a lot of senses. Desolation Road is an oasis in a harsh, red desert that stands next to tracks where fusion powered trains rumble past. There's a boom town period and outlaws and bounty hunters and traveling circuses. But these elements never really overpower the central focus which is the lives of the people of Desolation Road.

The book is a series of short 1-2 page chapters. Each chapter works with a different person in the town (or person from the town as the years go by and he founders have children and grand-children). Because it's a chronicle of history, the chapters have a narrative flow to them, but it's choppy rather than continuous. This isn't as big a hurdle as it might seem. The overall thrust of the book, like Dhalgren is to use lyrical, poetic language and a shifting, unstable narrative to shift the reader into a more dreamlike state where everything has both more and less meaning than a straight reading of the text would imply. Just letting go and letting the chapters wash over you makes the book an enjoyable bit of escapism.

On that level it was a fun read. It's not something I'd want to make regular reading out of, but only because books like Desolation Road work best when they've got a lot of "regular" fiction to contrast against.

later
Tom

Desolation Review

Hi,

So a few weeks ago, shadesong was reading Desolation Road by Ian McDonald.

"Hey, I've seen that, it looks neat," I said.

"It's pretty good, I'll let you borrow it when I'm done," said shadesong

And she finished it and gave it to me and now I've read it.

It was sort of a unique experience...most books I read don't come with strands of shadesong's hair in them. :)

Beyond that, Desolation Road is the fever dream tale of a martian community's rise and fall. It's very much a Western in a lot of senses. Desolation Road is an oasis in a harsh, red desert that stands next to tracks where fusion powered trains rumble past. There's a boom town period and outlaws and bounty hunters and traveling circuses. But these elements never really overpower the central focus which is the lives of the people of Desolation Road.

The book is a series of short 1-2 page chapters. Each chapter works with a different person in the town (or person from the town as the years go by and he founders have children and grand-children). Because it's a chronicle of history, the chapters have a narrative flow to them, but it's choppy rather than continuous. This isn't as big a hurdle as it might seem. The overall thrust of the book, like Dhalgren is to use lyrical, poetic language and a shifting, unstable narrative to shift the reader into a more dreamlike state where everything has both more and less meaning than a straight reading of the text would imply. Just letting go and letting the chapters wash over you makes the book an enjoyable bit of escapism.

On that level it was a fun read. It's not something I'd want to make regular reading out of, but only because books like Desolation Road work best when they've got a lot of "regular" fiction to contrast against.

later
Tom