Teaser

Alan Saul is a man with a mission: The destruction of the Committee that rules Earth with an iron grasp. Rising from the grave, Saul will stop at nothing to achieve his goals . . .

Review

The fun fact with which I begin this review is that The Departure is the book that made me give up on audiobooks for several years. Were it not for the fact that I’ve been meaning to give Neal Asher a second chance for some time now, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second listen. After all, I didn’t even finish it the first time around. Truth be told, I very nearly didn’t finish it the second time through either.

There’s a good chance you’ve heard of a film called John Wick. In it, a hitman mows his way through armies of thugs in a series of brilliantly choreographed fight scenes. The Raid takes a similar approach, putting its hero against legions of martial artists. Even classic films like Rambo make use of this formula. And it’s a good formula, for an action movie. But if you tried to write a novelisation of one of these films, I imagine the result might be something like The Departure. Because when you strip away the visual elements, there’s not all that much to like about brainless action.

Perhaps a more engaging protagonist might have alleviated my suffering. Alan Saul is a one-not killer. Early on, he tasers a man into unconsciousness. Then runs him over with a van. Then goes back to finish the job with some good old fashioned skull bashing. Everywhere he goes, people are shot, exploded and dismembered. I never thought I’d be the one saying this, but this book is simply too violent. Not in the sense that it makes me uncomfortable, but to the extent that there is nothing in here but violence and hatred. An individual scene could have had impact, but each outburst of murder is less effective than the last. By the end, it’s insufferably dull.

The Departure reads as a bizarrely angry book. there’s not a moment of joy. Scenes of brutality are paraded before the reader relentlessly. In one especially odd scene, Saul realises that he is a sociopath, factors the need for love into his mind, and promptly goes about killing once again. With such a ludicrously overpowered protagonist, there’s no sense of danger to anyone important to the plot, thin though that plot may be. We take the occasional trip to Mars, but while it’s nice to be rid of Saul for a while, the Martians are equally violent. Asher paints a world in which every institution is corrupt. Every human is either a coward or a villain. A world in which the only hope for any growth is to utterly destroy everything you dislike. It’s a flat worldview to portray, and a tedious one to listen to.

Alongside Peter F. Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds, Neal Asher is one of the big names in British science fiction. Unfortunately, like Hamilton and Reynolds, he’s an author I doubt I’ll be pursuing further.

Deeper Dive: Power Fantasies

The term power fantasy is usually thrown around as a pejorative. We readers mock author’s self-insert characters, and rightly so. The last thing I want to read about is an author’s rampage against the system/the man/injustice. I do try to stay oblivious to an author’s politics to avoid it tainting the work, but the more vocal an author is, the harder this becomes. Knowing what little I do about Neal Asher, it’s hard not to imagine he sees himself as a Saul-like figure, railing against the oppression of the world.

And yet, isn’t that what we all want? Are we not encouraged to identify with the characters we read about? Who among us can honestly say they wouldn’t like to tear down the social structures they disapprove of. Certainly there are elements of the current world I’d like to be rid off. There’s a certain therapeutic component to seeing fictional characters achieve what we can not. That’s a key part of literature. And in all honesty, if we were to set about achieving those daydreamed goals, we’d likely become as monstrous as Alan Saul himself.

Book Stats

• Book One of the Owner Trilogy
• Published in 2017
• Published by Macmillan
• An Grimdark SF Thriller
• 16hrs 52 minutes