Obsolete Your Idols

People had been telling me about but not exactly recommending M. John Harrison’s novel Light to me for a couple of years.  Having now read it, I think I can see why.  The story of this novel is very convenient, a sort of happy ending where everything fits a nice orderly pattern, but the construction of it aspires to concealing that pattern for as long as possible.  The setting is the near-past and the far future, and the central three human characters are depicted through a common lens of them making non-rational decisions which they then don’t attempt to rationalize to themselves or anyone else.  It revolves around a very large maguffin, indeed.  A strange place in space where every technology you try, works.

I found it a frustrating book.  Other people told me it was frustrating to read but they were talking about the prose style which is somewhat experimental. The language and constructs were much more accessible than those of some writers I’ve enjoyed (Robert Anton Wilson, William S. Burroughs, Samuel Delaney, Michael Moorcock, Jack Kerouac, James Joyce) and not really an impedance.   The thing which frustrated me about this story is how obliquely the author tries to tell it.  It’s a story I could express to you in thirty words.

The one thing I would like to champion about this book is the future setting.  I do like the idea of a place and time where radical physical form changes are trivial, computation is no longer a scarce commodity for anyone, intersystem travel is rapid and virtual reality addiction commonplace.  All of that is a fun setting to read about for me.

But to have half of the characters consolidated, the grand design revealed to be a trick all along, and the implausible actions of the characters not given some kind of an explanation, left me looking for the rest of this story.  There are fun bits and funny bits and there are sad bits and moving bits in this book.  But on the whole I can’t say I liked it.

Who might like this book

• fans of space opera
• fans of experimental writing, more poem in places than prose
• fans of Brin’s Uplift stories who want something in that vein

Who might not like this book

• people who hate omnipotent alien tampering ala Q of Star Trek: The Next Generation
• people who hate unreliable narrators who won’t even justify their actions to themselves