Teaser

The world is at peace. War, poverty, religion, all these things have been put away in the pursuit of utopia. This is Mycroft Canner’s history of the end of that idealistic age . . .

Review

Imagine going to see a magic show. The magician declares he is going to slice a woman in half. This is an old trick, and you’re pretty sure you know how its done. But it’s entertaining, so you go along with it. Then the magician adds another illusion. Not only will he saw a lady in half, he’ll do it while performing a feat of escapology, bound in chains and underwater. His assistant is a randomly selected member of the audience, who is tasked with spinning a number of plates throughout the trick. Magician, assistant, and lady will also be performing a quick costume change mid-trick. Blindfolded. At this point you think to yourself that this all seems a bit much. You wanted to see a lady get sawed in half, but now you’ve forgotten all about it. With all the additional sleight of hand, the core trick no longer feels important.

This is what it feels like to listen to Too Like the Lightning. We open with a note from the in-world author, explaining that, because he does not know who is reading this, he will ape an eighteenth century style to convey the alien nature of his world. What it actually does is allow Palmer to flex her considerable prose skills in replicating that old-timey way of telling a story. This early act is emblematic of the book, and the source of so many of my frustrations. Palmer is a fantastic writer of sentences, but every structural choice is absolutely maddening.

I remember reading reviews of this book when it first came out, and many compared it favourably to Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. In hindsight, that should have been my first warning. Palmer’s style is reminiscent of Wolfe’s for one simple reason: it is loaded with obfuscation. Wolfe layered his books with false narratives, unreliability, and word games. Palmer indulges in archaic styles, second-hand accounts, authorial censorship, and at one point a chapter that even the narrator admits is half imagined. Both authors strike me as being more interested in telling a story than in having a story to tell. The effect this has on me is a simple one: I stop caring very early on. There are so many layers weighing down the core narrative that I no longer have any interest in digging through them all. If the story was any good, it would be closer to the surface. I do not believe in art for the sake of art, but Palmer, like Wolfe, has not created a story, so much as a piece of literature. It demands investment, but offers no incentive to do so.

These issues are compounded by the audio format. Jefferson Mays is not my favourite narrator, but he does the job well enough, and he pulls off most of the accents this book throws around very well. However, at multiple points in the book, Mycroft’s narration is interrupted by another character, his editor after a fashion. This is most egregious when said editor (Martin Guildbreaker) cuts across Mycroft’s rather graphic description of a sex scene so loaded with exposition it becomes unintentionally hilarious. I would assume that in the physical book, this interjections are footnotes, and would work well as such. In audio, with only a single narrator, it sounds like someone having argument with themselves, worsened by Mycroft’s tendency to address the reader directly. I think having a separate narrator for Guildbreaker’s asides would have been to the book’s benefit, as is the case in Sandy Mitchell’s Ciaphas Cain novels.

It was a struggle to push through Too Like the Lightning, but I will say this in its favour. The final chapter would have made for a brilliant short story. In that format, the dark reveal would serve as the perfect bitter ending. Yet this is only the first of four novels, each of comparable size. Too Like the Lightning is a book that exists purely to set up events further along the line. A line that, based on this book alone, I have no interest in pursuing any further.

Audio Stats

• Narrated by Jefferson Mays
• Terra Ignota (#1)
• First Published in 2016
• Runtime 20hrs 19mins