Skip to main content

Arcadia (SF) - Iain Pears ***

The new novel Arcadia by Iain Pears comes as a beautiful hardback from Faber with a very effective cover design (the thing that looks like a number 7 is a cut-away door in the cover, so you see through to the illustrated world within). This book is a strange mixture of fantasy and science fiction. One of the main characters, Henry Lytten, is a member of the dregs of the Oxford Inklings, the leftovers and second-bests after Tolkein and Lewis have moved on, at the cusp of social change in Britain in 1960. Lytten is writing an epic fantasy novel, creating a world unlike his predecessors where story is the governing thread, rather than magic or royalty.

 Interwoven with this storyline is one from the future involving a device that hovers vaguely between time machine and a way to enter alternative universes (the 'science bit' is very woffly). However, the alternative universes aspect seems increasingly to be the case as a girl from 1960 accidentally uses the technology to enter Lytten's fantasy world made real, after an intervention from a rogue future mathematician.

 For those who want to be trendy, there is also an app version of the book. The idea is that the text is broken into a whole load of relatively short segments which can be read in any order, so that the reader creates the experience, or some such guff. As you might guess, I think this totally misses the point of a novel. As a reader, I don't want to do the author's job for him. I want to be led - that's the whole point of reading a book. If I wanted to write my own book I would, and often have.

 The idea that somehow the reader is freed up by throwing away structure, just because this is a multi-threaded story just doesn't make sense. It's like the difference between listening to Ralph McTell* sing about taking us by the hand and leading us through the streets of London and just putting 'streets of London' into a search engine. The unstructured approach does not deliver a satisfactory experience. So, for me the app is a waste of time - and I suspect it will fall by the wayside as often happens with these attempts to take books into a new dimension. (Remember CD-ROM interactive books? Or ebooks with sound effects?) I could be wrong. It could be the next best thing since sliced bread, but I genuinely can't see the benefit.

 We return, then, to viewing Arcadia as a straightforward novel. It takes a while to get into because of the multi-threaded storyline, and to begin with it's hard not to feel that the fantasy world concept is a touch derivative, particularly when C. S. Lewis is deliberately brought to mind, but once the author's ideas kick in on the full scale, we discover an impressive conceit, with an enjoyable interplay of fantasy and different timeline versions of reality (giving us a chance to ponder just what reality is). However, I did find my interest levels dropping at times. Like Lytten's fictional creation is an epic book as far as length is concerned - 596 pages - but it doesn't have an epic topic. In fact, the fantasy world Anterworld is explicitly designed not to be epic. The result is to sometimes make reading an uphill struggle.

 Perhaps the book's greatest weakness, causing some of this lack of reading drive, is that none of the multiple protagonists is well enough drawn, or far enough from a two dimensional central casting character to strongly identify with them. Perhaps reflecting the author's idea of a fluid structure it's hard to really get behind any of these individuals. Admittedly, though, that's nothing new in fantasy and SF (think Asimov's Foundation saga - the characters are far more cardboard there), so it isn't the end of the world, and Pears has certainly come up with a genuinely interesting, original and well-detailed premise.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more