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WK's Reviews > Anathem
Anathem
by
by
2.5/4.0
This book is a mess.
There's some grand ambition to the ideas here, but the ideas don't mix with the plot. The book's at its best when he abandons his fancy concepts to just spin the tale. There are great moments when he's doing only that, with the mess beginning again whenever he has to return to the information dump to explain what the hell is going on. More problems:
1) The vocabulary of his made-up world isn't well handled. It allows him to make some decent puns, but that's not nearly worth it. The half-assed otherworldness, where he uses conventional words when it's convenient and made-up bulshytt* whenever he wants to make things "foreign" is just grating. He should've done with bullshit the same he did with potatoes and not fuck around arbitrarily, which is just distracting.
*I'm not making that up. There are paragraphs and paragraphs about bulshytt, which is total bullshit.
2) The grand ideas aren't consistent. There's some attempts at high philosophy here, and it would be nice if it didn't so blatantly contradict itself.
3) Related to that (and this might be a slight spoiler, so beware), the actions of the main characters are rendered almost entirely irrelevant by a deux ex machina. Which is strange since this solution should've been available the whole time. In fact, the whole structure of the world doesn't make sense in light of what some of these people can do.
4) Stephenson's having problems with women and love again. Yes, the girlfriend has to be a convincing person, too, or the "romance" doesn't work. She's not, and it doesn't.
5) I get the feeling that this was inspired by Eco's Name of the Rose, with the focus on monastic life and a mystery. A totally intriguing concept, but he bungles the introduction to the world. He spends his time on the wrong details, and he doesn't take advantage of the time-frame available to him. With the concepts in the book, it could've been told over the course of 50 years instead of 1.
We're left with a novel with a lot of potential that simply misfires too many times. That can be tolerated with a 400 page book. It's unacceptable in a 900 page hardcover.
This book is a mess.
There's some grand ambition to the ideas here, but the ideas don't mix with the plot. The book's at its best when he abandons his fancy concepts to just spin the tale. There are great moments when he's doing only that, with the mess beginning again whenever he has to return to the information dump to explain what the hell is going on. More problems:
1) The vocabulary of his made-up world isn't well handled. It allows him to make some decent puns, but that's not nearly worth it. The half-assed otherworldness, where he uses conventional words when it's convenient and made-up bulshytt* whenever he wants to make things "foreign" is just grating. He should've done with bullshit the same he did with potatoes and not fuck around arbitrarily, which is just distracting.
*I'm not making that up. There are paragraphs and paragraphs about bulshytt, which is total bullshit.
2) The grand ideas aren't consistent. There's some attempts at high philosophy here, and it would be nice if it didn't so blatantly contradict itself.
3) Related to that (and this might be a slight spoiler, so beware), the actions of the main characters are rendered almost entirely irrelevant by a deux ex machina. Which is strange since this solution should've been available the whole time. In fact, the whole structure of the world doesn't make sense in light of what some of these people can do.
4) Stephenson's having problems with women and love again. Yes, the girlfriend has to be a convincing person, too, or the "romance" doesn't work. She's not, and it doesn't.
5) I get the feeling that this was inspired by Eco's Name of the Rose, with the focus on monastic life and a mystery. A totally intriguing concept, but he bungles the introduction to the world. He spends his time on the wrong details, and he doesn't take advantage of the time-frame available to him. With the concepts in the book, it could've been told over the course of 50 years instead of 1.
We're left with a novel with a lot of potential that simply misfires too many times. That can be tolerated with a 400 page book. It's unacceptable in a 900 page hardcover.
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
March 30, 2009
– Shelved
