The prior two books in this trilogy use many short chapters to slowly introduce readers to characters and situations, often ending with cliffhangers before switching focus to another story, then another, then another, then back to the first again to resolve it. This pace allows a sense of complexity to build throughout the book. By using short chapters, Brin allows details to be fresher in his readers’ heads than other authors, like George Martin, who use a similar chapter structure but much longer chapters.
And then here, in the third book, Harry is introduced. A neo-chimp who has cut ties with Earth in order to work for one of the great galactic institutes. He explores E-Space, which is this zone where ideas are alive—ideas are memetic creatures that have shape and some small material content. Where the characters that I’ve been reading for two books are still given short chapters, Harry’s are long. And for half the book Harry doesn’t relate at all to the rest of the story. It’s a problem of expectations: by starting the whole trilogy stating that these three books were written as one, then leaving Harry to be introduced near the end, I’m more confused than intrigued by his initial chapters. He’s too far off to one side. He eventually connects in somewhat interesting ways, but so much time is spent simply describing E-Space while furious action is going on in every other short chapter, that being asked to read Harry’s chapters is the first pacing problem these books have. Also, his connections seem more haphazard than planned.
The theme here deals with salvation. The Transcendence of the galactics starts to make sense as the reader is given more details through the story. The human concept of personal-salvation and the galactic concept of species-salvation come to some weird place where they almost synthesize but fall apart again. These are some interesting questions. And the science fiction aspect of the stories allows him to approach these questions in fascinating ways. There is literally a supernatural Harrower plucking ships off of hyperspace threads and putting them elsewhere like some old deus ex machina.
Concepts that had eluded him because they could not be shaped with images and feelings alone, but needed the rich subtlety of abstract language to shape and anchor them with a webbery of symbols.
To be clear, I do not think it a problem to learn about Transcendence now, after five other books hinting at this process. It’s part of Brin’s storytelling tactic to focus on what the reader needs to know for his story to make sense. I think that’s actually a strength of his storytelling—he trusts the reader without feeling like he has to info dump or spoonfeed them (the weird situation with him writing sequels for the first time, and feeling like he needs to recap his recaps in Infinity’s Shore and this book being the only contrary example).
But, Harry’s E-Space and the Transcendence questions show that this story has clearly gone from a tale of a few characters going through hard times in an interesting larger context—Brin’s bread and butter and what he does so well—to a tale focused entirely on that larger context, on big ideas as themes, on big ideas as characters themselves, who show up in Harry’s world of E-Space. For what I’ve read of Brin, this is outside the normal track of his writing. I appreciate that he’s experimenting and broadening his writing tasks. But he’s also a bit messy when it comes to the big questions, and he’s not as clear as I tend to expect from him. So, in part, I appreciate the experiment, though I think he fails at it in some ways. But this series is space opera, it’s over the top and excessive and melodramatic and I love that. I would rather somebody mess with these ideas than leave interesting things out of their novel. Brin just didn’t pull big ideas writing off as well as Arthur Clarke typically does.
It’s an interesting novel that ends up not being one of my favorites of Brin’s. His strengths are not played to as a writer, to an extent that it seems to go past experimentation and into some weeds that affect the quality. Harry’s chapters are initially so far out of left field that they pull me away from the other narratives I’m following from the first two books. By the time Harry is tied in with the rest of the book, it still seems haphazard and tenuous. But it’s worth reading for the closure of so many story threads from the first two novels. Probably. I liked it, but it will negatively affect my desire to go back and read this trilogy. I look forward to reading more of Brin’s writing though. His writing is consistently good.
No comments:
Post a Comment