A review of a book I didnt like

It’s been a while since I’ve read a book I ended up not being able to recommend to others. In fact, this book so surprised me by the fact that I really don’t like it at all that I wonder if I missed something in reading it.

I’m talking about Light, by M. John Harrison.

This book got some great reviews and blurbs. The cover art is spectacular.

See? Who wouldn’t want to read that? And the back cover copy was intriguing—
“In M. John Harrison’s dangerously illuminating new novel, three quantum outlaws face a universe of their own creation, a universe where you make up the rules as you go along and break them just as fast, where there’s only one thing more mysterious than darkness.

In contemporary London, Michael Kearney is a serial killer on the run from the entity that drives him to kill. He is seeking escape in a future that doesn’t yet exist—a quantum world that he and his physicist partner hope to access through a breach of time and space itself. In this future, Seria Mau Genlicher has already sacrificed her body to merge into the systems of her starship, the White Cat. But the “inhuman” K-ship captain has gone rogue, pirating the galaxy while playing cat and mouse with the authorities who made her what she is. In this future, Ed Chianese, a drifter and adventurer, has ridden dynaflow ships, run old alien mazes, surfed stellar envelopes. He “went deep”—and lived to tell about it. Once crazy for life, he’s now just a twink on New Venusport, addicted to the bizarre alternate realities found in the tanks—and in debt to all the wrong people.

Haunting them all through this maze of menace and mystery is the shadowy presence of the Shrander—and three enigmatic clues left on the barren surface of an asteroid under an ocean of light known as the Kefahuchi Tract: a deserted spaceship, a pair of bone dice, and a human skeleton.”

I will warn you. This back cover copy is entirely misleading. Whoever wrote it must have read the beginning and the end of the book, but nothing in between. In reality, here is what you had.

Random events. Whiny little girls flying space ships. A serial murderer running around randomly, being scared of his own shadow. A guy who can’t copy with reality running around bumping into random people. Random, vague, confusing revelations that don’t actually make sense. (and sex. Lots and lots of random, meaningless sex…what is it with authors who think that throwing in sex at every lull point makes their story humanizing? This aspect alone was enough to tick me off, and not only has it been a long time since a book has disappointed me, but even longer since I’ve actually gotten mad at an author for shoving a bunch of this crap in my face.)

Did I mention a lot of it seemed random? The protagonists, all three of them, come across as pity-party revelers, rather than any shade of sympathetic. I read the whole thing because I kept deluding myself, thinking that if I got to the end, something might happen that would explain it all. I get to the last page and…

Huh? That’s it? I don’t even get to know what happens to any of the protagonists? They all just end up aimlessly wandering off into existence, which is supposedly some big, incomprehensible muck of reality anyways? What kind of meaning and conclusion is that supposed to convey? And I really don’t like messages that everything is one futile march into oblivion, anyways.

I’ll admit, the one nice thing wasn’t about the story, but more the style. It’s very poetic. Evocative, and produces some lovely images. But beyond the lacy prose, I never really felt any substance in the thing. And we’re talking a Hugo award-winning author here! He’s getting praise all over the place for this, and a small part of me thinks I must be looking at it wrong to understand why it has been given such acclaim.

I read another review about the book that said the reviewer could only enjoy the story by keeping his distance from it. As soon as he tried to immerse himself, everything became one big bundle of hallucinogenic events strung together. And the title aside, much of the imagery and mood of the book is dark. Oftentimes morbidly so.

I’m giving this review mainly because I mentioned this title in my lineup of books to read, with promises of feedback. You can go give it a try if you want, to see if you are more philosophically illuminated than I. Or if you’ve already read this and somehow discovered the hidden nuggets I’ve overlooked, please let me know.

I can at least promise my review of the now-being-read Nightside series will be much more promising. I’m enjoying it quite a bit, though the overall feel is very different from the Dresden Files, which is a good thing, I’d say because I’d hate to see two series mimic each other all that closely.

I see that smile.