Author: M John Harrison
Publisher: Bantam
Rating: WARTY!
I've often looked at Iain Banks's novels on bookshelves and always put them back. Now I'm glad I did because he wholeheartedly recommended this novel in a newspaper review, so it tells me all I need to know about him! M John Harrison has a host of novels out there. Whether it's a heavenly host, I can't say since this is the first of his that I've ever read, but it isn't looking good.
I don't normally remark upon covers, since the author has little or nothing to do with the cover unless the novel is self-published. This blog is about writers, writing, and stories, not publishers, editors, and cover-artists, but I have to say that the cover design here fails in that it looks dirty - like even a brand new copy of this novel is soiled with dirty spots! Not pleasant, but perhaps that's the intended effect? It certainly portended my experience with this novel.
Harrison wastes no time in making it clear that he's one of those annoying authors who, because they went to the effort of creating a back-story for every minor character in their novel, has to share it with you in its entirety. And he's also one of those authors who is so proud of said characters that he has to parade them all out before you in the first few chapters, plot, story, and pace be hanged. The odd thing is that it turns out that none of his three main characters are in any way connected!
He's also apparently frightened by female bodies because he can’t talk about their "private parts". Hence he hides them all under the generic title of "sex". A man's hand doesn’t touch her vulva or her labia, or even her Mons Veneris, it touches her sex! Having said that, the story proved just about readable for at least the first one hundred pages, although I had to skip page after page of boring exposition - not of the plot, but of irrelevant or minor, or uninteresting characters. It’s not hard to see how this novel swelled to over four hundred pages. In the end I was reading only every third chapter because only one of his three main characters was interesting to me.
One of these three is a guy who is some sort of a weird serial killer in contemporary London, who also works in quantum computing. Another is a woman who lives many centuries in his future, who has become so tired of her body that she's dispensed with it and become part of her spaceship. Her problem is that the spaceship seems to have a mind all of its own - in addition to hers! She's trying to find out what the deal is. This was the character who interested me. There was not enough of her and what there was didn't make a lot of sense. There is a third character of whom I'm not even sure. It’s either the owner of a tank farm, or it's the guy who got liberated accidentally from the tank farm. Technically there's a fourth character - a shadowy figure known as The Shrander, who seems to haunt the serial killer, and which the killer's ex-wife (the one who has a "sex" in place of a vulva) also claims to have seen, so one quarter the way through, things were disturbingly vague, with not much happening or looking like it would happen, and with Harrison spewing cyberpunk terminology like he's in a William Gibson impersonator contest.
In the end, I read a bit more than a third of this, and it wasn't the first third. It was a third interspersed with the other two utterly boring, and in the end irrelevant to the novel, thirds. The interesting third featured the K-ship girl Seria Mau Genlicher, who has a name very evocative of the names used by Greg Bear for the advanced humans in his Eon series of novels. I liked this part of this novel, about finding and exploiting advanced alien technology from a vanished race. While there's nothing new or original to it, it was well done and had a really professional sci-fi feel to it. The other two thirds were about the most tediously boring people imaginable, and contributed, for me, absolutely nothing to this story.
That one third I would have rated worthy because it was engaging, particularly the capricious and moody Seria. The other two thirds are pure, adulterated trash. If Harrison has novels out there which he has written in the same idiom as the one good third here, then they might be worth reading, but if his writing is more like the 66% trash content here, then they're warty without question. That's the reason I'm rating this warty: it's purely on a percentage basis, and the novel had no ending!
