欧宝娱乐

It's difficult to pin down what the correct yardstick for evaluating a book like Light. In the end, it negotiates an uneasy truce between poetry, concept fiction, and narrative storytelling, doing so at the expense of all aspects. Light isn't quite a novel, and author M. John Harrison seems perfectly content with this.

If the book fails, it does so to the extent that the author playfully intermixes elements that have a narrative purpose with those that are mere emotional set-dressing. Much has been made, for example, of the book's prominent and generally dysfunctional sex acts. What is galling, however, is how capricious and unnecessary most of them are. They serve little function beyond shocking the reader or throwing them off balance, except possibly conveying a uniformly cynical perspective on sexuality. While the poetry of this is clearly a matter of taste, these spectacles do little to enrich the book's more fundamental themes of prophesy, created life, and revelation.

The book has its share of small triumphs as well. Because it adopts a three-protagonist alternating-viewpoint style, it it able to play with themes and references in clever ways. Many of its secondary characters display surprising richness. Concerned as it is with spectacle, it frequently paints tableaux rich with interesting ideas, even if many of these ideas prove to be superfluous. Many reader, I suspect, will come to favor particular storylines on the basis of which ones have the characters and ideas that successfully strike a chord, although I imagine few readers will find all three equally fascinating.

Overall, I'm satisfied with the book as a Work, to the extent that it challenges the reader to pay attention and rewards efforts to work things out in advance. But just because I'm willing to let a few such books sit on my shelf doesn't mean I need too many more of its ilk to follow.