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A grimly depressing read, hampered by a rote thriller narrative, with some long sections where it felt more like Bakker was, in a Randian/Stephensonesque fashion, just spouting his perspective verbatim rather than inhabiting the perspective of his characters.

Whether one subscribes to Bakker's conception of human consciousness or not seems to largely determine how most people have responded to the work, but my issues are more with the book itself, which seemed to me to somewhat needlessly cruel, awkwardly plotted, and filled with info-dump after info-dump, which interrupted the flow of the mystery/drama.

There were definitely elements of a good story here, and without a doubt the concept of neural hacking and brain states being used by the government and corporations is rich ground for narrative, but the serial killer/psycho-with-a-point structure seemed to unnecessarily hamper the more interesting ideas in play, (I was reminded somewhat of Broken Monsters at times, which also marries its pitch-black worldview with a crime/thriller plot). More damningly, Thomas, the central character, is such an obvious patsy that you spend the bulk of the novel screamingly aware of how Bakker has made the man into little more than a clumsy torture-doll in order to drive home his points. He exists to suffer, and not in a wry Liggotti-esque fashion, more like some kind of avatar of cluelessness in order that we the audience may have a come-to-brain-blindness moment in the face of his obliviousness. Indeed, there were moments where I felt as if I were reading Pilgrim's Progress, or some other such faith-infused screed. I have nothing against literature being used to make deeper points about the nature of humanity, but I do mind if it's being done clumsily.

It speaks to the reason that I regard Iain M. Banks as one of the great synthesizers in science fiction, because his political and social perspectives, whilst never opaque, were hard-coded into the structure of the stories themselves. You never felt like his characters were mere puppets on a stage for him to write a manifesto (an ironic statement in the context of this book), they lived, they bled, they desired, and they experienced more things in their worlds than simply a litany of cruelties in order for Banks to let us know how he felt about anarchism or religion or whatever.

I enjoy reading Bakker's blog, and his perspective holds a certain fascination for those inclined to indulge in a more pessimistic reading of the world from time to time, but this seemed to me a less-than-ideal way for him to make his points.