Light

Rating:
Summary: Tears for Fears
Review:
Light is a curiosity. In many ways it is vintage MJH - tricksy, terse and acutely observed, it returns to the character types and themes that stalk the pages of all his fiction, from short stories like Egnaro to the heady dark world of Viriconium. It's magical stuff, yet it's also rooted in and routed through the real experience of twenty first century life, with its layering of urban myth, chance encounters with random acts of love and violence, and the deathly ennui that lies only just dormant beneath the surface. It's also a great read - a roller coaster, turbulent, witty and excessive; more grown up than China Mieville, as visionary as J. G. Ballard and as silly as, well, as only M. John Harrison can be. My favourite character is the sordid and broken Valentine Sprake, a sort of monstrous Fitzrovian nutcase who has broken out of some second hand porn bookshop of the mind reeking of morbidity. It's a wicked book, but it would be off track to assume it isn't literary fiction. This is what literary fiction should be. You don't need to have read Henry James to read it, and it doesn't help if you have, exactly, but this is a serious book about the uncanny. It invokes M.R. James as well as Henry James, with a strong dose of Edgar Allen Poe, and in the character of Michael Kearney, scared, bombastic and ultimately childlike, Harrison delves into familiar territory, using fictional means to articulate the experience of pathological anxiety and the ways in which it collapses the boundary between the internal and external worlds. The novel is too much of a genre book to press that theme too hard, but in many ways it is one of his richest, and appears throughout the short stories and novels, continually morphing like the waking dreams of his characters. This is a novel that isn't scared of big ideas, or indeed of its own wild pretentiousness and posturing. M. John Harrison takes on all comers. He is a master of possibility, and the sense that the world is always capable of change feeds Light with its extraordinary energy. He isn't afraid to get down and dirty with the comic tradition and the very best of fantasy fiction. He's a superb stylist and a very, very funny writer. The trick is to keep it all up in the air, with a lightness of touch that is, at times, deeply moving and, in the end, strangely satisfying.

Rating:
Summary: Panoramic
Review: A serial killer and a tantrumic sentient ship named Seria Mau (releasing her inner child). "Chinese Ed" the "twink" addict. A rickshaw driver named Annie Glyph. The Cray Sisters. The Circus of Pathet Lao. Story in three parts. Grim contemporary story. Another: Space opera. A third: Cyberpunk. Stories come together in the last pages. Product references. Literary references. Cheap detective references. Shootings. Tech older than "legacy." Postmodern nanotech. Cats sane and insane. Cats black and white. Anorexia. Much ado about trains, plains and automobiles. Ghastly sex. Graphic sex. Over the top sex. Some humor. Calling Dr. Heands. Old spacers. Mysterious dice and old men who toss them. Quantum physics. Ten-dimensional space. Four-dimensional time. Handsomely printed large-size paperback. Kitchen sink? I don't recall it. Hard boiled egg. (Beep. Beep.) Err. Make that two hired boiled eggs. Four stars. (Five beeps.) Err. Make that five stars.

Rating:
Summary: Pretentious book
Review: Adding my voice to those who've already summed up the book's many flaws. I asked for this book for a Christmas gift based on the many positive reviews of it. What a waste. Dreary and unbelievable characters. Vague descriptions that leaves the reader guessing. Why should I waste my time with this?

Rating:
Summary: This book is hideously dull
Review: Full disclosure -- I haven't finished this book. I'm on page 153; it's taken me two weeks to get this far, when I normally finish books in a day or two. I'm seriously considering stopping here and throwing the book away. I've only done that twice before.

Why? Well, the book is dull. Deadly, deadly dull. It has three narratives, only two of which have anything of any interest going on, which alternate with every chapter, so 2/3 of the time you are just slogging through, waiting for the decent (not good, but decent) stuff to start. The first is set in the modern day with an annoying, contemptible narrator with whom I have no sympathy and in whose problems I have no interest. He does essentially nothing but act pathetic up to this point. He is a serial killer with some bizarre hidden push to kill, but the secret is SO hidden and SO opaque that it might as well not be there. Plus, he spends most of his time wandering aimlessly and dealing with his boring ex-wife. His plotline: he kills a woman. He meets with his business partner. He meets with his ex-wife. He goes to New York, does nothing there. He goes back to London. He kills someone else. He reminisces about killing other people. He hints that he has some dark secret. That's it, that's half the book.

The second narrative is in the far future, blah blah, in a typical cyberpunk setting with a guy who is a virtual reality addict. He doesn't even appear in any significant way IN HIS OWN CHAPTERS until the third of them. After 153 pages, this is what has happened in his chapters: he is in a virtual reality tank. He is forced out because he owes someone some money. He escapes because (I think) someone shoots the person he owes money to. He doesn't actually participate in any of this, since he's strung out. Then he lies around going through withdrawl. That's it. Half-way through the book, that's his entire plot line.

The third narrative is kind of interesting, in that it is where all the not totally cliche sci-fi happens, but still I have no interest in the character or what she is doing. Her story so far: when the book starts, she has just blown someone up (so we don't see the action). She goes to a planet, asks someone to explain something she bought from them. They don't, and no one bothers to tell us, the reader, what it is she needs explained. She goes to another planet. She gets attacked, and that's where I am.

150 pages into the book, something has finally happened. Unfortunately, it's happening to people I don't care about, and I've been forced to wade through half the book to get there. I have no desire to spend any more time with 2/3 of the characters. I've come across a few things that I haven't seen a zillion times before; I like the vision he has of these ancient ruins of races who have tried to explore and exploit the part of the galaxy where 1/3 of the book takes place. But having to put up with his characters and the leaden pacing makes it totally not worthwhile. I love Banks and MacLeod, who give positive reviews of the book, but this is nowhere near their caliber. I will never read anything by this author again.

Rating:
Summary: Glitzy and stylish but somehow ultimately insubstantial
Review: I am a big fan of M. John Harrison, from the Centauri Device through to the Viriconium books which I think are some of the finest fantasy works ever written. I really wanted to like this book and the reviews of other authors I also admire led me to expect great things. What Harrison does best is to write clever, inventive prose with a poetic edge to it and this book is no exception. In returning to science fiction Harrison has a field day with all the latest tropes of 11 dimensional super string theory, disposable clones and the fashionable side of chaos theory. I detected influences of Philip K. Dick, Delany and Brin (Kil'n People) but artfully mixed and written with a deft touch that is Harrison's own. This is all to the good, but somehow the novel as a whole left me disappointed. The main characters were deeply unsympathetic and below the surface of the style I just didn't care what happened to them. The resolution was vague and unsatisfying and in the end I felt that the whole was less than the sum of the parts. Harrison is always worth reading but he's done much better than this...

Rating:
Summary: a very disappointing read
Review: I bought Light on the strength of reviews and quotes, which I later discover to have been written largely by the author's mates - an apparently prevalent and ethically questionable practice in modern sci-fi/horror circles - and feel deeply disappointed and cheated.
Light suffers from problems typical of recent sci-fi: a reliance on cod science, with masses of simplistic jargon apparently designed to baffle us into thinking it's intelligent; airy plotlines that fall apart upon analysis; emotionally crippled, unconvincing, two-dimensional characters largely indistinguishable from one another, and really dreadful names. Try these for size: Tig Vesicle (!) and (oh, double moan!) Billy Anker. Billy Anker??!! I guess Mr harrison thinks that's a very clever joke. It isn't. It's infantile and simply highlights harrison's lack of self-belief. (A bit of a Billy himself, one has to assume).
This is the first book I've read of his.It will definitely be the last. Mr Harrison is a very small writer who's work would never see the light of day outside of sci-fi. He should go back to doing what he does best - whatever that may be. Something in common with Billy Anker, I would guess.

Rating:
Summary: An amazing, mind-boggling, extremely moving epic.
Review: I can't explain exactly why I found this book so moving. Maybe it's because I've been blasting through light novels for my past couple reads, and I reacted to actual substance in a novel with shock. Maybe it's because while I like Star Wars and Asimov, but I'm not a die-hard sci-fi fan (if you want to call this sci-fi).

Whatever the reason, this book is so original and fresh in thought and delivery that I didn't even think "genre" while reading it. I was too busy being immersed in every page - almost every sentence.

This is a review, not a synopsis, so I don't want to give anything away, and I just deleted about three paragraphs of things I wanted to point out. Just go read it. You will be pleasantly surprised. Keep your mind open, turn to the first page, breathe, and Go Deep.

Rating:
Summary: Downward to darkness, on extended wing
Review: I was ready to like this book more than I do, after reading several glowing reviews. I was ready to hate this book more than I do, after the first few pages. I recommend it as an entertaining read, not a life-changing one. Please read other reviews for plot descriptions; this is a reaction piece.

I haven't read any of Harrison's other work, and I give him credit for ambition and hard work here. He's cooked a stew that has flavors of William Gibson, Vernor Vinge, and Neal Stephenson, but anyone reading it to find those writers might not succeed. His scope and his mighty effort to weave meandering, hope-deprived threads into a unified, slam-bang ending mean that he's reached for the stars, and I want my science fiction to do that. For me, however, Harrison's reach exceeded his grasp. Some restaurants mix a lot of classy, interesting ingredients into dishes that don't work as a whole, and that's how "Light" went for me.

What gets in my way is not his story, but his story-telling. The language and style have that post-punk, technoid flavor, but not because the book's too science-y or geeky. His prose, to me, has a disjointed, staccato rhythm; his flow is jerky and his explanatory passages often don't. The title of this review comes from a Wallace Stevens poem, who also wrote, "The poem should resist the intelligence almost successfully." "Light's" language resisted my intelligence just successfully enough to keep me from really liking the book. I eventually got accustomed enough to the style to comfortably finish it, pushing for the ending that so many raved about. The style complaints I had early on came back big as he hit the home stretch, though, and I closed the cover without getting all Harrison was trying to give me.

The cyberpunk crowd should enjoy "Light's" dark tone and appreciate the illuminated, big-bang ending. It carries cultural and sexual nihilism a long ways to end on a revelatory note, and I wish it had worked better.


Rating:
Summary: Read it with a cheap holo of the Kefahuchi Tract on my wall
Review: It seems like every location 2/3 of the protagonists went SOMEBODY had a cheap holo of the Kefahuchi Tract on the wall, so why not?

The serial killer plot was a little redundant and unnecessary, though did present one of the few sympathetic characters in the book (the ex-wife), but as for the other two their amorality wasn't a big problem for me - antiheroes are usually much more interesting characters than heroes. The story itself wasn't all that compelling, though it did wrap up reasonably well if a little too sappy considering the nihilistic tone of the rest of the book.

Harrison is a good visual writer, and some parts of the book were quite funny (I especially liked the idea of the New Men who worshipped 20th century junk culture), but one flaw of the book was a feeling of being too rooted in the present, i.e. throwing a lot of quirkiness window-dressing that just felt a little contrived, such as a roving gang dressed as Japanese high school girls, hardly the kind of thing to be expected on a world centuries in the future and thousands of light-years away.

Now, if this book was intended as a kind of darker version of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, it'd be a more enjoyable read.

Rating:
Summary: A stunning fractal novel, not for everyone
Review: Light was a perplexing read, but in the best way. China Mieville mentioned M. John Harrison as an author to read, so being a Mieville fan I had to try Harrison out. Heck, Neil Gaiman gave the novel an enthusiastic blurb, so it must be good, right?
But, the story didn't grip me at first and I found myself wondering what the big deal was even while recognizing that Harrison is a true wordsmith. Even if this novel deeply turns you off in all other ways, any literate reader should recognize the quality of the writing. Harrison has a true gift for stripped down sentences and a powerfully apt use of vocabulary. Even in the early going, when I was kind of bored, I found myself rereading passages for the simple pleasure of the words on the page.
The plot was bizarre, lurid and somewhat jarring - jumping around in time and space to various loser protagonists. There were three storylines and although I assumed a resolution, the connections remained fuzzy and I was to the point of just getting through it. But about three quarters of the way through something happened - I got it. This is a brilliantly structured novel and I curse my lack of early attention now. Light should be approached as literature, not genre fiction. The convergence of the three characters and their stories happened so gradually, the realization startled me. When you realize there is not three stories, but just one story, interconnections missed earlier spring out. It was a singularly mind blowing epiphany for this veteran SF reader. I am still struggling with the text, but have to recommend Light as a singularly fascinating read.
Light is a fractal novel about fractals, where large ideas are reflected in smaller scale throughout the text. No details, but keep fractals in mind and you will see patterns brilliantly woven throughout the book. This novel gets five stars with the full recognition that it is a personal statement - the book just leapt out and blew me away. Light is going to irritate many and enrage a few like only powerful writing can do. I compare it to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest in this way - a book with loud proponents and detractors. But honestly the book this reminds me the most of is Gravity's Rainbow. It's not in that league but there is a resonance. Light challenges SF conceits and blows away expectations and is aimed at those bored with popcorn heroes and trite space opera. But I can see even bright, literate readers having a hostile reaction.