Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (Robin Sloan)

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
Robin Sloan
Picador Paper
Fiction, Adventure/Fantasy
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Clay Jannon really thought he'd be going places as a web design specialist in San Francisco, until the Great Recession hit. Worse, every gig he might qualify for pits his less-than-a-year of practical experience against the hordes of other web designers and computer specialists who also lost their jobs when the startup bubble popped. He finally manages to land a job - not behind a computer, but at the counter of a peculiar San Francisco bookstore. From the moment he walked in, Clay knew something was odd about Mr. Penumbra's place, but he doesn't realize how strange until he works there. First off, the shop barely sells any of the used books in the front. Secondly, the handful of eccentric regulars only want to borrow from the ceiling-high shelves in the back, peculiar tomes whose contents appear to be gibberish when Clay takes a peek inside. When his curiosity gets the better of him, he manages to sneak a volume out of the store to investigate further... and ends up over his head in a hidden world of secrets, cults, and the search for a possible formula for immortality encoded in some of the first books ever printed.

REVIEW: This is one of those books I keep hearing about, so I had reasonably high expectations going in. Maybe that was my problem; I should've kept the bar lower. Or maybe the world has changed so much, generally for the worse (particularly the image of Big Tech), that it doesn't have the same impact in 2023 as it did in 2012. It's also possible that I've just consumed too much media that had a similar message (and similar "love letter to books" theme), that this one didn't blow my metaphoric socks off like I'd been promised it would.
Things start on an iffy note with twenty-something Clay, a typically shallow and short-sighted computer guy who is thrown for a loop when the "sure thing" promise of fortune and job security in his field crashes against the reality of a rough economy and a glut of others who all thought the same thing and got the same training has he did. (I say "typically" for the sort of character he is, naturally, not "typically" for real-world people of his profession or age. Because by now, I think we've all read quite a few characters written to this template with minimal variation... but I digress.) He's not the kind of person I enjoy being around, yet the first-person narration sticks me in his head for the entire story, even when he's being an idiotic and hormonal young man. He stumbles into a job with elderly eccentric Mr. Penumbra, securing the position when he admits a love for an obscure fantasy trilogy that turns out to have greater plot significance later on, and takes a little too long (i.e., wastes the reader's time) before deciding to actually investigate the strangeness. In this endeavor, he's aided by an FX expert roommate and a best friend/former gaming party companion, as well as by a new girlfriend who happens to work at Google. The author practically worships the vast benevolent power of Google and Big Tech, presenting the campus and company as a budding utopia destined to solve all the world's problems, up to and including conquering death itself. How different things look a mere ten years later, where tech is less a genial divinity and more a tool too often exploited by the worst impulses of humanity and capitalism (and I'm not even getting into the idea of piracy as a victimless crime that somehow coexists with this golden vision of a blameless corporate behemoth like Google)... but, again, I digress. In any event, the investigation and Clay's discoveries, made with the help of wonderful and beautiful technology, ends up causing big problems for the bookshop and Mr. Penumbra, who is part of something much larger and older and potentially more dangerous and world-altering than simply selling used books, or even lending old tomes of encoded text to a select group of obsessed eccentrics in the Bay area. When it looks like Penumbra may be punished for his actions, Clay sets out to make things right, and gets in even deeper than anticipated. All of this eventually builds to a climax where medieval printmaking and modern technology intersect, and... well, to get much further ventures too deep into spoiler territory, eventually culminating in a message that was not exactly the earth-shaking revelation it had been built up to be for me.
There's something strangely throwback about the book, despite the prominence of modern technology and Google product placement. (One very refreshing aspect was that tech was not inherently wrong or evil, for all that Sloan went a little too far the other way by doing everything short of offering sacrifices before graven images of a company logo. Penumbra recognizes the potential for technology in increasing the spread of stories and literacy, and even in solving mysteries of the past.) The cast is exceptionally and conspicuously male-heavy, and the women, barring a few extras, were almost invariably included to give the geek guys suitably hot girlfriends; cross this with an overall shallowness to characterization (especially of anyone with XX chromosomes), and it gives the story a retro vibe in a not good way. Even the conclusion to the great mystery feels like something that would've been revelatory maybe in the 1980's, but by now is more than played out. (And it's not exactly retro, but I also have to note that the audiobook presentation included a few parts that were supposed to be a recorded book being listened to by Clay, and the way the production made it sound like a tape, with degraded audio quality and all, was distinctly unpleasant.)
That said, there are points in its favor. As mentioned previously, it manages to embrace the wonder and beauty of old books and beloved stories while not excluding newer technology and its potentials, pointing out that, at the time of their invention, printed books themselves were the bleeding-edge tech of their day, the industry as tumultuous and competitive as any Silicon Valley startup culture. It offers some interesting glimpses into the many hidden obsessions and collections of the world, for all that there's not a lot in the way of actual magic in the story itself (I hesitated to even label it as "fantasy", but Amazon claims that's what it is). And, as tooth-grinding as the Google worship became over the course of the story, the glimpse into the inner workings of a tech behemoth could be interesting (in limited doses), as well as the nostalgia for the days when it seemed companies like Google could indeed potentially deliver the tech-driven utopia they promised. It's also not too long of a book, even though some scenes could've used a little trimming. Thus, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore lands a midrange Okay rating.

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