Reviews and Comments

The most interesting, mind-bending comic I've read. The basic conceit is that every image on every page is of the same spot, a room in the house the author grew up in, in New Jersey. The time frame shifts from before there was a recognisable earth (possibly before the history of the universe?) to some way into the future, and as the book goes on it jumps around more and overlays progressively more stories on top of each other. Some are told in a fairly linear way over a few pages, while others are dropped and picked up later, and others just left to be inferred.

I loved the sense of the hugeness of history and smallness of today that this book conveyed better than I've ever seen done with writing. And I loved the sections where different stories progressed at different speeds.

I read this in one evening, but I know I'll be back, probably jumping in and out in a less linear way. One thing to remind myself as much as anyone else: the book was published in December 2014, which is relevant because some of its storylines are in the recent past or near future.

Wow. For the first half of this book I thought it a bit artless and frustrating, but it turns into a very much cleverer and more subtle work than I had been expecting. Ultimately the book is utterly damning about colonialism without ever romanticising what came before it.

I feel weird tagging "spoilers" about a book the outlines of which are pretty well known, and the plot of which is basically described in the publisher blurb, but in spite of all that there were some surprises as I went, so here goes:

First of all, there is one thing that annoyed me intensely through the entire book: the complete lack of any development of female characters or voices. I can imagine a defence of that in terms of the book describing two intensely patriarchal cultures and their meeting, but I'm still digesting Achebe's critique of Conrad. One of his more on-point criticisms is that Conrad writes about colonialism in Africa without ever giving a single African character a real voice - it's fair, but then it rankles to see Achebe do exactly the same thing to women, especially in a book that's partly about brutal patriarchy.

The first part of the book, describing the traditional society that existed before colonisation, is an interesting mixture of pastoral and horrifying. It's not hard to see how people would value what they had, and find its disruption by outside forces intensely painful, but there's also plenty about it that is terrible. Not only the status of women (property whose only apparent chance at any agency at all is by cheating on the husband they didn't necessarily get to choose), but murder of twins, mutilation of sick childrens' corpses, and casting out of men who don't fit a very specific mould. At first I was frustrated by Achebe's stalwart refusal to allow a hint of judgement on any of this; by the end I saw it as a real strength of his writing.

Once things do start to fall apart, I came to appreciate that by keeping any editorialising out of the way, Achebe was able to let his characters and story say all that needed to be said about their own society. The real genius of the book is in its dissection of how weaknesses in the existing culture allowed missionaries to make inroads, how effectively the missionaries manipulated this (often without seeming to understand what they were doing), and yet how disastrous this all was for the people it happened to in spite of the completely unvarnished portrayal of what they had before.

After a year of false starts, I finally admitted I just couldn't get into this book. It's strange because I've loved a lot of Conrad's work, and I certainly see the same beauty of writing here, but this one just wasn't grabbing me. I don't know if it's the slower pace than most of his (but his other relatively long books also start slowly), that he was writing further outside his experience than usual, or that I've changed and some of the troubling things about Conrad now bother me more than they used to.

An odd, compelling read. On the face of it, this is the diary of someone who walks around New York a lot, has some moderately interesting friends and very small adventures, but is worth reading because he himself is interesting and erudite and loves making connections between things. In other words, it's a lot like reading Cole's nonfiction, and for a lot of the book I couldn't shake the feeling that the narrator was just the author's mouthpiece. Which is alright--after all it was Cole's nonfiction that got me interested in reading his novel in the first place--but if that were all there was to it I don't think it would have held my attention over 200 pages.

What made this book special for me was its distillation of a very particular feeling: that of having a lovely time going about my business, while always conscious of the horror of the world around me. I do see this in Cole's nonfiction, but there's something about letting it ebb and flow through a much longer, more rambling work than allows it get much more powerful, and in the last few chapters it becomes completely crushing.

Mostly excellent, but badly let down by a couple of weaknesses. I got the feeling that Rushkoff was starting to get tired of writing these, so in a couple of places he started to spell out the 'rules' a little too explicitly for my liking, as if he was grasping for a way to bring it to a close. And then the ending itself was horrible! I understand the desire to have modern humans overthrow the gods, but the way he did just didn't add up. If one of the major themes of the series is the constant danger of slavery to greed & materialism, that ending was a triumph of those things presented as a triumph of humans.

After dipping with Vol 2, I think the Testament series hit its peak in Vol 3. The Job story struck me as particularly well done, both as a dramatic story in itself and as the best-working correspondence between ancient and modern timelines. The rest of the book comes pretty consistently close to that standard.

I found this the weakest of the four books in the generally impressive Testament series, mainly because the technobabble that is a minor irritant in Vol. 1 picks up in intensity, to the point of actually being quite distracting. Some of it's just that a little mysteriousness is just fine, especially in a book based on religious scriptures (some of the tech reminded me of midichlorians...), and some of it's that the specific things the tech was given credit for just don't make sense. I suppose I was hypersensitive to it because what Alan Stern is depicting as trying to do at the start is more or less the grotesque version of what my PhD was going to be all about, as perceived by people who don't understand the work and fear things they don't understand....

Strong start to a very interesting series.

I love the parallel ancient and modern storylines, and think he uses the visual separation between gods and humans very well indeed. I also appreciated the interaction between gods not generally believed in by the same sets of people - he has some really ambitious ideas in that respect and pulls them off pretty well.

The one thing that marred it was a certain amount of technobabble. Sometimes it would have been better to just leave the technology vague, rather than positing things that not only don't quite make sense, but also demystify the story a little too much.

A delightful, but slow and sometimes aimless book. It's an odd form - entries from 6 years' worth of journals, compiled by the late author's partner into one composite year. That made for somewhat disjointed reading, in that every time I put the book down it took me a while to get back into its rhythm. On the other hand, that format combined with Deakin's lovely evocations of place and mood builds up a gorgeous and very alive portrait of where he lived and the passage of the seasons.

A rather patchy collection. The poems I liked best conveyed a strong sense of watching the world through aging eyes, and saying goodbye to old friends - Heaney using his own aging for material in the same way as Johnny Cash's heartrending last few albums - but there were also many that I just found inaccessible, in spite of having been a fan of his work for some time.

I bought this book by mistake, having wanted to read something by Mieville for a while but not having realised it was his "young adult" novel. No matter - I loved it anyway. He did a beautiful job of keeping the language simple without ever seeming to talk down to the reader, and the plot uses a certain degree of naivety on the part of its teenage protagonists, without ever making them seem stupid or clueless. It's also a great, wild fantasy novel that manages to say rather a lot about the real London that's only ever in the background of the book.