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Two hefty reviews
May. 30th, 2015 10:49 amHey,
I've spent most of the month wading through two door-stopper books. Both are genre fiction at opposite ends of the spectrum.
First up is The Vorrh by Brian Catling. This is a fantasy/magical-realism novel set somewhere in Africa just after WWI. The colonial town of Essenwald sits next to a vast, mysterious forrest called the Vorrh. Except for a slender railway to a logging camp, people don't generally go into the woods. Aside from the fantastic creatures that live within it, the woods tend to disturb people and disrupt their memories. The local people have any number of tales and legends about the Vorrh, but even they shy away from it.
So one of the several story lines is about a man who fashions a bow from his dead wife and travels into the heart of the Vorrh and the local guide sent in to track him down and stop him. There is also the story of an aristocratic young woman and the cyclops boy she discovers in a long-forgotten house. There's a Frenchman looking to sate his jaded tastes with an excursion into the interior. There's even a side story about the secret adventures of Eadweard Muybridge (the guy who made the early movies showing horses hooves come up off the floor when it runs).
It's a difficult book. The various stories only intersect fleetingly (if at all) and plots never really seem to resolve. You get the sense that there's a lot of subtext and allegorical meaning, but nothing ever really provides a key to access any of it. Ultimately, the end result is unsatisfying. The writing in and of itself is fine, but it never really adds up to anything. Maybe that's the point, in the way the Vorrh itself is ultimately unknowable, but again, a little unsatisfying.
I was more than satisfied with The Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. On Page One they blow up the moon. Then they spend the next 2/3rds of the book mounting a shotgun operation to save humanity from the after-effects of that. There is some amazing writing going on here. A lot of hard sci-fi on display discussing orbital mechanics, the various technologies that a project like this would require and so on, but the book never gets too wrapped up in technical geekery. There are lots of well-drawn scenes between the various characters in the book and a good mix between action-adventure type scenes and more emotional/introspective ones.
On the last third of the book, the time-frame shifts forwards by 5000 years to follow people on a mission to reclaim Earth. Because this is so much further out, things get a lot more speculative and there are a couple of big leaps that, in lots of other books, I wouldn't mind, but because Stephenson has been hewing so closely to reality for the first part of the book, it seems more glaring.
Oh, and as you might guess from the title, Seveneves has lots of solid female protagonists and it passes the Bechdel test in spades.
This is easily some of the best fiction I've read this year and I strongly encourage people to check it out.
I've spent most of the month wading through two door-stopper books. Both are genre fiction at opposite ends of the spectrum.
First up is The Vorrh by Brian Catling. This is a fantasy/magical-realism novel set somewhere in Africa just after WWI. The colonial town of Essenwald sits next to a vast, mysterious forrest called the Vorrh. Except for a slender railway to a logging camp, people don't generally go into the woods. Aside from the fantastic creatures that live within it, the woods tend to disturb people and disrupt their memories. The local people have any number of tales and legends about the Vorrh, but even they shy away from it.
So one of the several story lines is about a man who fashions a bow from his dead wife and travels into the heart of the Vorrh and the local guide sent in to track him down and stop him. There is also the story of an aristocratic young woman and the cyclops boy she discovers in a long-forgotten house. There's a Frenchman looking to sate his jaded tastes with an excursion into the interior. There's even a side story about the secret adventures of Eadweard Muybridge (the guy who made the early movies showing horses hooves come up off the floor when it runs).
It's a difficult book. The various stories only intersect fleetingly (if at all) and plots never really seem to resolve. You get the sense that there's a lot of subtext and allegorical meaning, but nothing ever really provides a key to access any of it. Ultimately, the end result is unsatisfying. The writing in and of itself is fine, but it never really adds up to anything. Maybe that's the point, in the way the Vorrh itself is ultimately unknowable, but again, a little unsatisfying.
I was more than satisfied with The Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. On Page One they blow up the moon. Then they spend the next 2/3rds of the book mounting a shotgun operation to save humanity from the after-effects of that. There is some amazing writing going on here. A lot of hard sci-fi on display discussing orbital mechanics, the various technologies that a project like this would require and so on, but the book never gets too wrapped up in technical geekery. There are lots of well-drawn scenes between the various characters in the book and a good mix between action-adventure type scenes and more emotional/introspective ones.
On the last third of the book, the time-frame shifts forwards by 5000 years to follow people on a mission to reclaim Earth. Because this is so much further out, things get a lot more speculative and there are a couple of big leaps that, in lots of other books, I wouldn't mind, but because Stephenson has been hewing so closely to reality for the first part of the book, it seems more glaring.
Oh, and as you might guess from the title, Seveneves has lots of solid female protagonists and it passes the Bechdel test in spades.
This is easily some of the best fiction I've read this year and I strongly encourage people to check it out.
