Author: David Spon-Smith (no website found)
Publisher: Unknown
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
Errata:
p18 " Lazarus' " should be: " Lazarus's " - Lazarus isn't a plural.
p18 "...he's seen it to." should be: "...he's seen it too."
p19 "The crowd roar their approval." should be: "The crowd roars its approval."
This novel has no preliminary pages whatsoever other than a title page and a prologue. Chapter one began on page eight, and chapter twenty-one concluded on page 422. There was nothing after that, meaning that this book contained absolutely no acknowledgments or publishing information at all. Kudos to the author for so effectively breaking with tradition!
Given this, I found it very strange that there was a prologue! I guess some antiquated traditions have a very powerful stranglehold indeed. I skipped the prologue as I skip all prologues. I don't see the point of this quaintly stodgy and antique conceit - especially when the prologue is in book two or later of a series! Excuse me, but wasn't book one the prologue? That's not the case with this novel since this is "book one", but I've seen that kind of thing often enough to find it thoroughly hilarious. The bottom line is that if the author doesn't think that the text is important enough to include it in the main body of the novel, then I sure don't consider it important enough to expend my valuable time upon it. I've never regretted skipping a prologue!
While the book is superficially 415 pages, the text is extraordinarily widely spaced, at least in the Advance Review Copy, so with normal spacing, this novel is probably closer to 200 pages. It reminds me of my first effort at producing a novel and it strikes me as a serious waste of trees if a novel like that ever ran to a print version. Were I keeping a running score, I'd have to deduct points for that, I'm afraid. It's also first person PoV, the most potentially disastrous voice, which means that I felt slightly antagonistic towards it to begin with, so keep that in mind!
The first paragraph began really weirdly:
It's so cold, so cold I can't feel my face any more. The sort of morning when murmuring snowdrifts fall out of the blackness, drowning out everything except the crackling of the power grids. Behind me stands the City, its chrome Scrapers pierce the dusty sky like needles in my skin. In front lays the Borough, its grey ruins broken by time and neglect. The Wall surrounds us both. Everywhere else, snow white wastelands as far as the eye can see.
I have no idea what some of that even means, and it's so disjointed, with broken sentences, non-sequiturs, and bad metaphor that it was actually painful for me to read. That's not the choicest feeling with which to imbue your readers in the first paragraph of chapter one!
This vein continued with some truly odd phraseology, such as "...like a rocket sending me to the universe and back." on page 23. Aren't we in the universe? How do you go to the universe when you're in it already? Another example is (and this is in keeping with some really unpredictable initial capitalization which the author has going on: "We stop at the first bit of Pinewood we come across." which makes it sound like they found a small piece of pine sitting on the ground and stopped because of it.
On top of that, the voice isn't only first person, it's also present tense too, which makes for odd reading and some inventive sentence construction, but the most annoying two things in the first few pages were for one, the strong similarity between this and the Hunger Games, and for two, the tedious repetition that this guy Baxter (the main character who's narrating this story) indulged himself in, telling us with irritating frequency that his mysterious and dangerous "twin" was trying to get loose inside him and he must fight it.
That was really and truly annoying, especially given that when this "twin" finally does rise up, all it does is tell Baxter to follow his new-found friend Trent as they escape! Why was Baxter so scared of a sheep like that when all it does is give directions like a GPS device in a car? We have to conclude that either it's not dangerous, or that he really doesn't know his 'twin' at all well.
The Hunger Games motif here is of course, in that young people are being 'sacrificed' for entertainment, with a massive discrepancy between the impoverished and badly done-to sacrifices on the one hand, and the wealthy, strutting peacocks of the capital residents - which here are referred to as 'city people'. There's even a 'Caesar' character, here named Lazarus.
But before they're actually forced to fight to the death, Baxter and Trent jump over the city wall into the soft snow, to make their escape. As it happens, Mary (Baxter's evident love interest) shows-up right at the last minute and manages to find her way past any security, and though the crowds just in time to escape with them. Why they never made this escape before today goes unexplained. Mary is of course beautiful, because you know the only significant thing about a woman that there can possibly be is beauty. Nothing matters when it comes to women, except superficiality.
This novel is heavy on endless conversation, between stretches of which are tiny links of descriptive prose, which meant that it gave me absolutely no sense whatsoever of the world in which these endless conversations and some action described in sentence fragments are taking place. Yeah it was a desolate wasteland, and yeah it was a bitterly cold winter, but what else? I never learned. I got no sense of place or atmosphere at all. As I mentioned, the novel has a lot of white space between lines, and this is how it felt in terms of world-building - all gaps with very little to fill them.
So I made it to page sixty, which is just over ten percent in, and I could honestly find no compelling reason to read any more. I wasn't interested in these characters, or their plight, or their world, and I honestly didn't care what happened to them. They had no appeal for me whatsoever. As the movie preview announcer might phrase it: "In a world where there are gazillions of books, one man chose to read only those which really gave him a great ride. I'm sorry, but this novel doesn't make that list.
