I am a devoted fan of Neal Stephenson, and it pains me greatly to say this, but this book is a bummer.
Polostan is not a novel. It is a rushed spatteriI am a devoted fan of Neal Stephenson, and it pains me greatly to say this, but this book is a bummer.
Polostan is not a novel. It is a rushed spattering of skeletal, unrelated historical setpieces that Neal Stephenson has jotted down in his notes over the years, and somebody decided to publish these notes without allowing them to be tied together and fully edited. The setpieces are connected solely by the diaphanous thread of a single character, a character who has very little to do with her surroundings at any given time.
There is no sense of conflict or stakes. I wish I were exaggerating, but I sadly must report that this book does not contain a story. All it does is set up a character. The reader hopscotches unsteadily through geography and time from one random historical scene to another, with no sense of direction until the last couple dozen pages. Are you wondering why the blurb seems so generic and doesn't hint at what is going to happen? It's because there's a lack of content-that-happens for the blurb to so hint at. The protagonist doesn't even have a goal until five pages before the book ends. I'm not exaggerating: only the last chapter gives any reason or opportunity for the protagonist to act to change her circumstances, and even then the other character integral to this action has only been introduced one chapter previously, so his characterization is necessarily thin and the connection between the two is disastrously rushed. If the Soviet timeline had involved this character from the start, this would have been a much stronger book.
The most disappointing part of Polostan is that the writing style is plain and dull compared to Stephenson's typically exuberant, stylish, observant, and hilarious prose. Perhaps only one in every 50 sentences exhibits a trace of the style I've come to love so much from Mr. Stephenson. This may be intentional—Stephenson is the master of the third-person limited perspective, in which the prose subtly changes to reflect the intellect and mental / emotional state of the primary character concerned. This style is markedly effective (and hilarious!) when he bounces between chapters from hifalutin academic to ruthless hitman to master hacker to cyborg dog, but when the entire book exclusively follows a 16- to 18-year old girl of no academic or professional repute, it mostly comes across as typical YA novel writing, a style that is not at all in line with why I read Neal Stephenson.
I'm confused where "Bomb Light" could even go from here. And I am not alone in this confusion. In the acknowledgments, Stephenson himself announces that he can't even give proper thanks to anybody besides his lifelong editor because he has no idea where this thing is going.
Fortunately, the last 60 or so pages of the book pick up some a semblance of a story compared to the narratively vacuous first 240 pages, at least in the sense of a hope emerging that the two main timelines connect in some way that gives the main character a semblance of an idea of an opposing force to act against. And in the last few pages, finally that does happen.
I'm still a big Stephenson fan, and Polostan ends on a note promising a real story is just around the corner, so I will probably give Bomb Light #2 a hesitant try. I just wish they'd given Polostan another year to cook instead of releasing it half-baked....more
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