Monday 30 December 2013

The Best of All Possible Worlds

(December 2013)



A curate’s egg, this one. Despite my generally favourable opinions regarding Ms Lord’s other book, she goes straight ahead and nicks my title (Voltaire? Who he?) and then slaps it on a novel which is one of those best described as ‘interesting but flawed’.

Worlds is set in a (presumably) far-future era where humanity has (presumably) colonized large interplanetary stretches of the galaxy and plumps for the “entire planetary population as a single ethnic group” trope, which is a little hackneyed but (presumably) forgivable. It opens with a genocide and then goes on to explore ideas of diaspora, survival, dislocation, integration and assimilation, genetics and culture, and love and tolerance. Well, I say ‘explore’, it’s more ‘introduce, toy with, then discard in favour of another shiny shiny’. Lots of interesting stuff is brought to the fore, then kind of left there as the story moves on. That’s not the main problem with this book, though.

The trouble is the language. We know from Redemption in Indigo that Lord can write, and we know it here as well from the third-person framing sections dotted throughout the book. Most of it, however, is narrated in the first-person by Grace Delarua, a young biologist writing in what is presumably meant to be a breezy, colloquial manner. This style is entirely in keeping with her jaunty, superficially naïve personality: a personality which is inhabited and fleshed out pretty well by the author. These sections really do read like (what I imagine of) the diary of a young woman who’s never written anything else. Unfortunately the diary of a young woman who’s never written anything else turns out to be, somewhat predictably, very badly written indeed.

To reiterate the point, there is plenty of available evidence to suggest that this is not a failure of the author’s ability, but the fact remains that this really comes across as Star Trek fanfic: distant and intellectual, yet honourable and lustworthy foreign races; a superficial episodic structure; a protagonist who, while fortunately very likable and engaging, is essentially a Mary Sue. This feels like a reasonable debut self-published novel might: there are clear signs of promise and potentially engaging characters and ideas, but the execution is inconsistent at best. However, this is neither a debut nor self-published so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to find it all a little disappointing and underwhelming.

But, for all that you know Grace will always eventually land on her feet, and the romantic subplot is almost insultingly telegraphed, she is just so damn likable and that, it would seem, is enough. Or enough for me to finish the book, at any rate.


9 comments:

  1. I sadly never got around to properly reviewing this book, although I will have a mini-review of it in my Best of 2013 book post that will go up later today. I've enjoyed reading reviews of this book, which are all over the spectrum. The points you make of its flaws are valid and I completely agree with you that the author's style is not poor writing it is actually very good writing given that she was indeed writing the book as if it was a diary entry, one from a woman sent out to do a job who is not trying to be flowery but instead recording moments and recollections of her days. The difference I think between our feelings about the book is that worked well for me and I enjoyed that aspect of the book very much as it felt more like someone was sitting down and telling me about their day. I cannot help but wonder if nearly overdosing on short fiction during the year also makes me more prone to like this style of storytelling, where we get snippets here and snippets there which taken as a whole tell an overall story but don't necessarily flow together in the typical narrative form.

    I was most impressed and will definitely be reading Redemption in Indigo and her new book, Galaxy Game, when it comes out next August, which takes a character from Best, Rafi Delarua, and follows his path of growth and independence.

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    1. Yep, responses seem to suggest that this is a very Marmite book. Redemption in Ingido is very enjoyable and I'd recommend that to you with no hesitation, and I am rather hoping that this is her Difficult Second Album and RiI wasn't the exception.

      The short story angle is an interesting one, as if you're more attuned to that (for want of a better phrase) then I can see the absence of a more overarching plot wouldn't be so much of an issue, but for me it was very hard to get over the whole 'Monster of the Week' feel of each chapter (which again, fed into the whole Trek fanfic vibe).

      I'm going to stick with the poor writing claim though ;) I can easily believe that it's excellent ventriloquism, but I would definitely question the wisdom of choosing to use the voice of someone who can't speak/write/whatever for toffee. Hopefully Rafi has a bit more in the way of literary chops next time around.

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    2. It certainly is possible, though we'll have to agree to disagree on that one.

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  2. But if you want to talk about how bad the U.S. book cover was, you'll find me in complete agreement. I think this version is much better.

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    1. Oh, now there's a barrel of worms. Am I projecting my own admitedly less-than-perfect ideas here, or was the US cover massively whitewashed?

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    2. It was a very odd choice for a book by a woman of color which celebrated culture to have a couple of characters who looked as if they had the digital equivalent of whitewashing done to their images. I just didn't understand the thinking there at all. I liked the elephant. But that isn't saying much.

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    3. "I liked the elephant. But that isn't saying much." I want this on a t-shirt. Aside from that, yes to all :)

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