I’m a latecomer to Neal Stephenson. For some reason, the recent Anathem was what got me to stop walking past his thick slice of bookstore shelf-space. I ate that book up and basked in the “found-a-new-author” feeling. Anathem was a fascinating meditation on monastic life crashed together with science-fiction world-building. It also had the infamous Stephenson pacing – for fans, you grit your teeth and love it. Reamde, Stephenson’s latest, is different. It requires no teeth gritting. After a mere 100 pages or so, things are off and running. This book books, in a blockbuster fashion that’s apart from his norm. And actually, that is one of the problems that make this my least-favorite of his books so far.
To anyone who hasn’t read any Neal Stephenson, I will describe the “pacing” thing. Fans enjoy his prose patiently, nurturing the persistent feeling of, “well, this is interesting, I wonder where this is going.” While most authors (especially authors with sci-fi in their DNA) would be content to build this feeling for a chapter or three, it’s not uncommon to go well past the halfway-mark in a Stephenson novel without reaching the tipping point.
There’s definitely stuff happening in his novels – tons of layered events, action, characters, settings, research, history, humor, and ideas. But the tipping point, where you finally feel like “all right, now we’re on our way,” comes late. In fact, I never found it in his famous Cryptonomicon. Gasp, I stopped reading that halfway through. And my third experience, The Diamond Age, was so sneaky that I think Neal telepathically put it in my head a couple minutes after I’d completely finished the book (which was amazing, by the way).
But Reamde? You are able to draw a bead on Reamde pretty quickly – the plot drops in and goes thataway very early on. And then, at after the halfway-mark, instead of finding the tipping point, you find the book running out ideas. It totters along, thinning out until, for the about the last 300 pages, all of the characters only have one collective (and boring) goal among them. Just one. And you keep hoping for some twist to dice things again, but aside from an explosive red herring, nothing comes.
And, the writing. I happen to think Neal Stephenson is skilled with his words (though perhaps too in love with archaic ones). And he uses a lot of them, while still maintaining a modicum of discipline (as opposed to “where’s the editor?”). In Reamde? Undisciplined. All characters speak and think, and all exposition is described in, very clear “Neal-speak.” Mostly, Neal-speak is entertaining and eloquent, but it is not appropriate for all seasons. Snarky asides are just as likely to sneak into scenes about Walmart (there are several) as they are to pop up in scenes of stress, pain, and peril. I don’t expect gravitas, per se, but a novel this long told entirely in the authors tone of voice is grating, and in many cases it undercuts the drama. Now, back to that phrase I used earlier, “drawing a bead.” There are a lot of guns in this novel. And they do a lot of drawing. Of beads. Again and again, that phrase. It’s like fricking Mardi Gras. And large chunks of prose are as lazily put together as that joke.
Nevertheless, this is a Stephenson novel, so there is still passionate world-building at play. In this book, it takes the form of a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game called “T’Rain.” This video game world, how it was built, the culture within and around it, and the people who maintain it are all fascinating. And Stephenson does the nearly-impossible: he writes well about the act of playing a video game. He makes it interesting to read and adorned with astute futuristic touches. He describes a game that I want to play, and thus I can buy the fact that everyone in the world plays it, to a degree even beyond the ubiquity of real-life World of Warcraft (its explicit inspiration). When the book is interleaving T’Rain with the real world, it’s at its best.
When you add in the titular “Reamde” virus, which infects the game, you suddenly have two fascinating forces inhabiting the book. But as the book runs through a series of progressively ominous antagonists – each one commanding progressively more and more of the book – each has progressively less and less involvement with T’Rain and Reamde. By the time the long guns-blazing finale arrives, the best parts of Neal’s creation have been squeezed out of the novel completely. We’re left with an ending that, for all of its made-for-cinema action, is blunt and dishearteningly predictable. There is only one meaningful mention of T’Rain in the final pages, when the main character Richard reminisces for scant paragraphs about his abandoned game alter-ego. This short interlude was a heartbreaking glimmer of a better, more manifold climax that might have been.
And so Reamde, unlike most Neal Stephenson novels, follows an arc that is well-paced and accessible, but ultimately it lacks the imaginative culmination I’d expect. And the nail in the coffin is the final chapter – a denouement with with all the heft and payoff of the Ewok celebration dance at the end of Return of the Jedi. That is, all of the characters are trotted out to smile at each other one more time, so that you can walk away knowing that everything works out okay. Stephenson fans with Reamde, just like Star Wars fans with Jedi, will walk away thinking, “it started out with such promise. What the heck happened?”
New Grump
DuckBall Devlog 007: Taking Off
