Railsea: A Novel by China Meiville (2.5 stars)

I'm a huge Meiville fan, but I've been putting off reading this one because it sounded boring. It was.

Take Moby Dick, turn the ocean into dirt, ships into trains, whales into giant moles. That's pretty much it. The Railsea was ridiculous, but I was willing to look past that for a good story. It feels like Meiville has dialed down his usual dark and dirty world-building to make this YA, and I think that's what I missed the most.

I didn't care about any of the characters. The world building was light and unconvincing compared to New Crobuzon. Some people found all the replacing 'and' with ampersands infuriating, I didn't really care, but it was a silly gimmick. While it's third-person the narrator often addresses the reader, which makes it feel a bit more campfire-tale, and often addresses exactly what I was thinking, which was mostly:

TIME FOR THE SHROAKES? Not yet.

I guess some English teacher will enjoy assigning this to compare and contrast with Moby Dick, but it has nothing on the rest of his books.

2.5 stars

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (2 stars)

I had no idea what I was getting myself into here, well that's not entirely true, I had some vague trepidation about it being very literary and a bit slow. If I'd seen the length of the physical book I may never have picked it up, so I guess I have the kindle to thank there. Some spoilers ahead.

So I hopped on board. Murakami is obviously a gifted writer, and I had no trouble getting interested in the story. Something is amiss with the world after The Taxi, and I start speculating about what Fuka-Eri is: alien? robot?

It seemed like just adding Tengo as a co-author would have been a whole lot simpler, but whatever, I'll allow it. Why does Tengo never say his girlfriend's name, does she even exist? What's up with Aomame and head shapes for random sexual partners? I go and listen to Janáček’s Sinfonietta.

Then HOLY CRAP there's little people crawling out of someone's mouth, but the story just continues on as before. OK that was nuts, now I'm really hooked what's going to happen?

Every now and then there's a literary gem dropped, I loved the suspense built by this single line:

“According to Chekhov,” Tamaru said, rising from his chair, “once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired.” 

At about page 500 the Tengo and Aomame threads are linked for the first time! Ah-hah!

At page 545 I wrote "Good god, is anything ever going to happen in this book?" and I lost heart.

“Tell me,” he said, “how much of Air Chrysalis is real? How much of it really happened?” “What does ‘real’ mean,” Fuka-Eri asked without a question mark.

Some more people get killed which is renews my interest, but I have no idea who is a real person or a doha anymore. And I don't really care.

“Ho ho,” said the keeper of the beat.

OK that's creepy and cool, do more of that. Please scare me, at least it will keep me interested.

By the time I'm living through Aomame spending a few months looking at a playgound in what feels like real time when she has a perfectly good private investigator that could find Tengo with a few phonecalls I just wanted it to end. There's only so much time I can spend inside someone's head staring at a slide in a playground. Just make it stop.

Random new characters of no importance are introduced at page 1000. I couldn't care less.

“It’s so detailed and beautifully written, and I feel like I can grasp the structure of that lonely little planet. But I can’t seem to go forward. It’s like I’m in a boat, paddling upstream. I row for a while, but then when I take a rest and am thinking about something, I find myself back where I started.

Yep, where are we going here? Will this ever end?

“Ho, ho,” one of the Little People intoned from somewhere.

So here it is, a vast dreamscape with some occasional weird moments but really mostly just a lot of sitting around and reflecting, rehashing a single hand-holding incident over and over, and describing lots of intricate boring detail, for 1,300 pages. Murakami is a great writer, but the only possible way I could of enjoyed this was if it was at least 600 pages shorter and some of the weird shit actually went somewhere.

2 stars.