association-list

A good first novel here. Already Teppo has a good grasp of pacing and devel­op­ment and has cre­ated a dark, con­sis­tent sub-​​creation that man­ages to make its magic feel mag­i­cal with­out ever feel­ing like it’s being made for the con­ve­nience of the plot. There’s actu­ally some mostly-​​believable char­ac­ter devel­op­ment which comes from within the char­ac­ter and his moti­va­tions, rather than being exter­nally imposed, which is rare in noir/​cyberpunk inflected nar­ra­tives. That said, there are flaws, which fall into two broad groups. I wrote the list below in an email to a friend (edited to make me look better/​smarter):

1. basi­cally no women in it at all. the semi-​​love/​hate inter­est gets all of five pages of screen time, which is mostly Markham emoting.
2. although he’s not entirely cookie cutter, there’s still a lot of generic noir pro­tag­o­nist there.
3. most of the other char­ac­ters lack a voice. every­one sounds like Markham in dialog.
4. sentence-​​level craft is uneven, weaker in the begin­ning of the book. it’s first-​​novelitis to a cer­tain extent, but I almost threw the book across the room when I ran across the groaner ‘metal whale’ purple blob of a simile in the ferry chapter.
5. we’re sub­jected to not one, but TWO Oblig­a­tory card by card Tarot inter­pre­ta­tions that are the bane of so many fan­tasies involv­ing her­metic magic and the occult. to make mat­ters worse, they seem to take up at least five-​​seven pages each (at least in my memory). by making your fore­shad­ow­ing into a cutesy game, you cheapen it. I’d have strongly sug­gested com­press­ing or cut­ting both.
6. really, I am kind of done with cyberpunk’s noirish off­spring. that may be a per­sonal thing.
7. seat­tle and port­land seem lonely. non-​​named char­ac­ters who aren’t going to be mag­icked hor­ri­bly or aren’t wait­resses don’t get a lot of men­tion past the begin­ning of the book.

So there are some per­sonal quib­bles in there. I’ve never been a big fan of noir stuff, and have always con­sid­ered it to be some­thing of a bale­ful influ­ence on post-​​cyberpunk SF, mostly for rea­sons involv­ing the character’s inter­mit­tent lack of agency and often dras­ti­cally unre­al­is­tic dystopias in which it is usu­ally set. Almost all of the other things that I had issues with were, now that I’ve had a couple of days to think about it, fail­ures with the book’s voice. Here too, as in KoNLG (see last post), we have a number of severe issues flow­ing from issues with the first person sin­gu­lar. It’s very hard to get right, as I’ve said. Here, the strain is less on the reader as the nar­ra­tor is end­lessly blind­sided, as much as it’s a ques­tion of tone in a number of places. Scene descrip­tion is all over the place in terms of level and intent, in ways that would often be fine with some exter­nal nar­ra­tor (omni­scient or per­sonal) or a first person nar­ra­tor more anchored fur­ther in his­tory, as opposed to this nar­ra­tor, where the only thing sep­a­rat­ing past and present first person sin­gu­lar is the verb end­ings. Also I would like to make a rule: In a book writ­ten in the first person, you get ONE (1) scene tran­si­tion ush­ered in by uncon­scious­ness. Per-​​instance penal­ties to follow when I think of some­thing dire enough. Points 1, 2, 3, & 7 I would ascribe to these sorts of issues, rather than any fail­ure on the part of the writ­ing (other than I sup­pose the struc­tural fail­ure of choos­ing FPS and not quite being able to make it work for the whole book).

I seem to spend a lot of time in these reviews talk­ing about how I still think the book is good and worth read­ing despite the fact that I’ve just dwelled at length on its flaws. Mostly, this is because I am a hor­ri­ble, neg­a­tive person, but par­tially it is because while I do often like the books, I spend a lot of time think­ing about what would make them better, in hopes of being able to do the same with my own writ­ing. I real­ize that this may not endear me to writ­ers who’re talked about here, but hope­fully one day they’ll have the oppor­tu­nity to return the favor. I promise to weep piteously and upload it to youtube.