For my birthday, my sister’s boyfriend gallantly lugged all the way from California a pre-publication copy of Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, “REAMDE”. At just short of a thousand pages, it must have taken a fair chunk of his luggage allowance, and like a 3-hour movie, you can’t help but feel that a book that long might have benefited from a stricter editor. Certainly, Stephenson’s love of technical detail, and tendency to throw all his ideas into one pot, is very much in evidence. And yet I found myself utterly unable to put it down all the way through.
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After an exhausting week’s reading, I found that I had reached half-way through the book, but only a week of action had taken place. Actually, that’s not quite true, as there’s plenty of words spent on background information, including one particularly awkward flashback to fill in the back-story of a newly introduced character. Not that the passage itself isn’t enjoyable, but since we don’t meet the character in the present tense until we know her entire history, it feels a bit like Stephenson is saying “oh, sorry, there’s something I meant to mention earlier; don’t worry, I’ll get back to the action in a minute, you’ll see”.<\/p>\n
And in a sense, that is this book’s main flaw: there are simply too many stories and ideas crammed together, which might have been better left to stand on their own merits. The online world of T’Rain, for instance, is a brilliant piece of SF invention, and the politics surrounding it would have made an intriguing novel \u2013 but this is not that novel, so Stephenson hurriedly tidies the sub-plot away to make room for the real action.<\/p>\n
And what action! I’ve never read a book involving so many guns (or at least, so many guns given such prominent and specific descriptions \u2014 Stephenson jokingly acknowledges one Deric Ruhl as “ballistics copy editor”), but nor have I read another book which concludes with a chase involving a woman being chased by a bunch of jihadists, being chased by an IT entrepreneur and a Chinese peasant, being chased by the rearguard of the jihadists, being chased by a secret service agent, being chased by a mountain lion. The action scenes, and the tangled webs which bring together its motley cast, are the real focus of this book, and they work brilliantly.<\/p>\n