Too Like the Lightning
The Terra Ignota series, Book 1
Ada Palmer
Tor
Fiction, Literary Fiction/Sci-Fi
** (Bad)
DESCRIPTION: On 2400's Earth, power structures and societal norms have been radically altered. Humans no longer identify with geographic nations but with Hives of like-minded people. Nonviolent criminals are sentenced to life as Servicers, essentially slaves unable to own property or acquire money and required to aid any who demand it. The family unit has largely been replaced by bash'es, community dwellings of mates and friends. And, ever since the bloody Church Wars, organized religion has been outlawed, priests replaced by sensayers: those trained in the innumerable belief systems and philosophies of humanity who act as spiritual counselors.
Mycroft, a Servicer with access to some of Earth's most powerful individuals, was assisting the prominent Saneer-Weeksbooth bash' - center of the global transportation system that keeps the modern age moving and nations borderless - when he stumbled across a secret that would eventually remake the world: the boy Bridger, whose mere touch and willpower could bring toys, drawings, and mere ideas to life. As one of the few privy to the child's secret existence, he takes it upon himself to defend him from a world not yet ready for him, and to defend the boy from a world he is not yet mature enough to face... but a series of seemingly unconnected events begin to tip the global balance of power. In such chaotic times, secrets will undoubtedly be revealed, for good or ill.
REVIEW: It's not often that I can say a Bad review is a generous rating, but I had to take into account the fact that, in most ways, this story and this reader were completely mismatched from page one. Given that I could not have been the intended audience, take my opinion with a healthy dose of salt.
This is a literary novel to its marrow, a book where the reader is expected to be conversant in eighteenth-century philosophy and ancient politics and numerous other topics I generally find as fascinating as drying cement, and at least as thick to slog through. Without such interest or expertise, it read like the written version of the Codex Seraphinianus, an art book purporting to describe a surreal alternate world that contains bizarre pictures such as multi-headed birds and transmogrifying humans, but with all text written in an entirely invented, intentionally untranslatable script. Like the Codex, I was presented with strange, often baffling images of a world I could scarcely relate to, with walls of words that meant next to nothing to me. This sense of disconnect was not helped by the writing style, which deliberately (and often aggravatingly) mimicked eighteenth-century styles in its slow, description-heavy pace, frequent tangents, and multiple breaking of the fourth wall to address the hypothetical reader, not to mention a general expectation that I'd find anything the narrator chose to describe gripping; at more than one point, I was supposed to be spellbound as various characters calculated statistics. Characters - of which there were far too many, often with multiple names that I was supposed to somehow keep straight - were universally unlikable caricatures, often twisted (not helped by an unreliable narrator who might be insane), with not a single healthy relationship between them. The future world claims to have cast off gender identity, yet time and again gender-based stereotypes (not always tied to anatomical gender) played out in heavy handed ways - some of which was deliberate given the narrator's proclivities and Points Being Made about society, all of which was tooth-grinding. Most of the cast seemed to be terribly important, Hive leaders and such, but be danged if I cared about any of them, especially viewed through Mycroft's writing. It all takes place in a future that's essentially a bizarre update of the Enlightenment, one where radically altered societal norms merely create new markets for deeper deviations and depravities and hedonism under the surface... but, since I couldn't care about the characters, I couldn't care about the world that their actions and power games might save or destroy. What's the plot actually about? Darned if I could describe it even after reading it, as the plot (a dense and convoluted thing involving murders and possible religious cults and a coming global recession and power plays, all only incidentally touching on the miracle boy Bridger) really isn't the point. Like many literary novels, it's more about the themes, the ideas, the mood, and the various topics the author wanted to lecture about via the loose framework of a book. (I was not at all surprised to read that the author is, in fact, a history professor.) Naturally, as the first in a series, the ending doesn't really wrap up much, making it all the more disappointing.
I had heard many interesting things about Too Like the Lightning. It was a contender for major awards. It had lots of positive buzz. And I can see just enough to understand how someone other than myself would be taken with it (enough for me to soften the rating I almost gave it, to allow for my own lack of literary taste): it does create a very unique future, for one thing, with societal changes on almost every level in ways that some authors neglect. But ultimately I could not enjoy it. My lasting impression is that any book where a character who quite literally can conjure life with a touch is relegated to a half-forgotten subplot compared to economic crises and what amount to board room meeting minutes has gone wrong at some point.
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