A novel of ideas that would’ve benefited from more emphasis on the novel and less on the ideas.
An intellectual who earns his living as a “watchman” in a rapidly deteriorating America investigates a brutal assault while also researching his ancestors’ imperial exploits in 17th-century Sri Lanka.
In a satisfying twist on more traditional dystopian fare, the America of the future is unsettlingly recognizable in de Silva’s debut novel. Yes, faith in government has crumbled, violence is frequent, and various factions are warring with each other, but Starbucks and Target have managed to survive the chaos. In the fictional city of Halsley, Carl Stagg is paid to “wander and watch,” pacing the streets at night on the lookout for unusual activity. His routine is interrupted, however, when he discovers a severely beaten prostitute and begins to search for clues as to the perpetrator. Subplots abound and eventually coalesce: a fellow watchman is involved in a project to manipulate the weather; the prostitute, Jen, immerses herself in the adult film industry; Stagg, whose true passions are writing and history, prepares a series of lectures about European interlopers in Sri Lanka in the 1600s (some of the novel’s best chapters are set then). De Silva manages these varied plots skillfully, but in a novel rife with academics, his penchant for jargon too often makes the prose difficult to parse. A musician considering the “physics of sound” realizes that if he “were serious about cleaving to the harmonic series, what mattered was saving the smaller integral ratios, especially the superparticulars, as Ptolemy’s scale did.” Digressions into science and philosophy are equally abstruse. This cascade of detail ultimately serves to obscure big ideas, not illuminate them, and readers may find themselves too put off by the flood of exposition to engage with an otherwise intriguing story.
A novel of ideas that would’ve benefited from more emphasis on the novel and less on the ideas.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-937512-39-2
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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