When read as a novel in the classical sense, this falls short. The idea to exemplify mathematical concept in an alternate reality, where the inhabitants are able to do infinitely many countable things in finite time is nice, but it has not enough flesh.
I like the jokes based on inversion of concepts: Sentient cars having sex with humans inside and a character that begins as a giant beetle and then turns into Greogor Samsa.
The Laconian Empire has fallen, setting the thirteen hundred solar systems free from the rule …
A decent ending which does not try to be more than just that
3 stars
Every saga has to end, for sure. The saga, as art form, is problematic, because the individual installment will often not convince as novels. That is especially true for thing like "the expanse" when the narrative sets out to follow a set of characters linearly over decades of in-story.
But we, the readers, have little right to complain: It is the sort of story we crave after all, because we crave a deep immersion into the narrative.
"Leviathan Falls" stays true to its predecessors: It shies away from potential narrative arks to focus on its characters and do them justice. Overall, that is the right decision.
The "closing of the gates" ending must have felt too defeatist to authors, so they added an epilogue where humanity is traveling between the stars again. It kind of works.
A decent ending which does not try to be more than just that.
A novel about the survivors of an atomic war, who face an inevitable end as …
Dated but still affecting
4 stars
My version is actually missing the T.S. Eliot quote:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Indeed. A lot of things are dated here. The female characters are eyebrow raising at times, and at the time of writing, nuclear winter was not properly understood.
But the way almost everyone in this novel is determined to continue with their little occupations and past times right until the end captures some truth about human nature.
Thinking about it further, there is a hint of a pessimistic philosophical undercurrent: The inhabitants of Australia die blamelessly, the war which brought on the lethal radiation was not theirs. And yet, their pastimes express an objectifying carelessness with nature and life. When one of anglers gives advice:
I like a little frog. You get alongside a pool you know about two in the morning with a little frog and …
My version is actually missing the T.S. Eliot quote:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Indeed. A lot of things are dated here. The female characters are eyebrow raising at times, and at the time of writing, nuclear winter was not properly understood.
But the way almost everyone in this novel is determined to continue with their little occupations and past times right until the end captures some truth about human nature.
Thinking about it further, there is a hint of a pessimistic philosophical undercurrent: The inhabitants of Australia die blamelessly, the war which brought on the lethal radiation was not theirs. And yet, their pastimes express an objectifying carelessness with nature and life. When one of anglers gives advice:
I like a little frog. You get alongside a pool you know about two in the morning with a little frog and put the hook just through the skin on his back and cast him across and let him swim about...
Or when each race of the final Australian Grand Prix results in dozens of car crashes with casualties.
Striking is also the speechlessness with regards to the war itself (which just so happened) and what could have been done to prevent it:
Newspapers, he said. You could have been done something with the newspapers. We didn't do it. No nation did, because we are too silly...
My reading is that western culture has an inherent defect which is blame for its demise. Its the old thesis that technical advancement with an essentially unchanged human nature will lead to catastrophe.
It was fun to read this in a language I can just so read. It gives the prose a more archaic feel. And maybe the nordic sound of Danish is a good fit. The book itself is enjoyable even for a non-Tolkien fan and only occasional fantasy reader like myself.
Too much detachment be it for creation or apocalypse
2 stars
Books like these, which are not driven by plot but by language and style are always a bit tougher to discuss.
I loved reading the first couple of pages, the first person narrator's description of giving birth in this witty and detached style, somewhere between prose and poetry.
There are two plots from then on, the narrator's son's first year from baby to toddler and a journey through a country thrown into violent turmoil but a flood catastrophe. The country is actually the UK, but that matters none, because all particularities are abstracted away, along with all the names of novel characters. There is an echo here of Saramago's "Blidness", which took a similar approach.
The issue is that this style-based approach gets somewhat strained even in a short novel like this. To phrase the problem differently: A first person narrator who can keep that level of poetic detachment no …
Books like these, which are not driven by plot but by language and style are always a bit tougher to discuss.
I loved reading the first couple of pages, the first person narrator's description of giving birth in this witty and detached style, somewhere between prose and poetry.
There are two plots from then on, the narrator's son's first year from baby to toddler and a journey through a country thrown into violent turmoil but a flood catastrophe. The country is actually the UK, but that matters none, because all particularities are abstracted away, along with all the names of novel characters. There is an echo here of Saramago's "Blidness", which took a similar approach.
The issue is that this style-based approach gets somewhat strained even in a short novel like this. To phrase the problem differently: A first person narrator who can keep that level of poetic detachment no matter what is actually going on the the material world outside seems an implausible invention.
Plot wise, the "quest" is how she and her son get reunited with "R" the boys farther, but that is also something which just "happens". I do like the carefulness and the indirect approach to emotion, but the author takes that so far, that I cannot help just letting the narration float by, stanza after stanza.
The antipode of this novel has to be "The Road" by Cormac Mc Carthy: Where the reader has to live through the post apocalyptic world's gritty material reality and any form of detachment from it is hard-won both by the reader and the novel's characters.
