Too Much Richness
Sep. 1st, 2007 05:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselJuly 2007
River of Gods - Ian McDonald - Pocket Books, 2005
* * *
As I have remarked before, reward-to-effort ratios are a fundamental determinant of human behaviour and they apply to reading just as much as anything else. Any book that demands concentrated effort from its readers has to deliver a commensurate reward, in the originality of its insights, depth of characterisation or ingenuity of its plot. With nine intertwining story lines told from nine different viewpoints, River of Gods is certainly a complex and challenging read, and in some respects it repays the effort invested. In others, however, it doesn’t.
Where this book really scores is in its evocation of a near-future India. Having visited Varanasi, the city where the story is set, I can confirm that McDonald accurately captures its exotic, spiritual, chaotic and slightly menacing atmosphere. His political extrapolation - India has fractured into twelve semi-independent nations - seems (depressingly) plausible too, though I would have liked a better sense of the sizes and relations of the states and the events by which they came into being.
The main characters are well-drawn and do a good job of illustrating the richness and complexity of Indian culture. For some reason I was most drawn to Shaheen Badoor Khan, a smooth-tongued political advisor with a dark secret, but I also enjoyed Lisa Durnau, an academic who runs a Second-Life-on-steroids virtual world called Alterra, Mr Nandha, a “Krishna cop” tasked with tracking down rogue AIs, his frustrated wife Parvati, and Vikram, a stand-up comic who inherits an industrial conglomerate that is investigating zero-point energy. Other characters include the journalist Nadia, Shiv, a small-time criminal, Thomas Lull, a dropout academic, Tal, a nute (person who has undergone radical surgery to remove all traces of gender) and Aj, a waif with unusual powers.
The challenge of the book comes from the fact that the stories of these characters are told in parallel, forcing the reader to hold multiple plotlines in memory for long periods (in my case, at a chapter or two a night, it was over a week between updates on a particular storyline). It is particularly unfortunate, therefore, that the overarching SF plot that braids them together doesn’t cohere. As with the characters, McDonald has jammed together a number of familiar tropes - AIs out of Neuromancer, a Big Dumb Object in the sky a la Arthur C. Clarke or Greg Bear, parallel universes from just about everybody - into a plot that wouldn’t be out of place on Dr Who. There are some original ideas; the concept of nutes is interesting and well explored through the viewpoint of Tal, and the development of AIs as characters in virtual soaps is a nice touch. The climax, however, seems forced, with the motivations of many of the characters becoming obscure as the plot picks up pace, and is not as transcendant, original and - well - Indian, as I’d been hoping for. Having invested so much time in the characters, I would have also liked rather more happy endings than you get.
Basically, McDonald has captured the diversity of India but in doing so has sacrificed the internal logic of his story. Nonetheless this is a big, rich and atmospheric book, and if I’d been able to read it over a shorter period such as a holiday I would probably have enjoyed it more. The rewards are there, but you have to minimise the effort required to achieve them.
River of Gods - Ian McDonald - Pocket Books, 2005
* * *
As I have remarked before, reward-to-effort ratios are a fundamental determinant of human behaviour and they apply to reading just as much as anything else. Any book that demands concentrated effort from its readers has to deliver a commensurate reward, in the originality of its insights, depth of characterisation or ingenuity of its plot. With nine intertwining story lines told from nine different viewpoints, River of Gods is certainly a complex and challenging read, and in some respects it repays the effort invested. In others, however, it doesn’t.
Where this book really scores is in its evocation of a near-future India. Having visited Varanasi, the city where the story is set, I can confirm that McDonald accurately captures its exotic, spiritual, chaotic and slightly menacing atmosphere. His political extrapolation - India has fractured into twelve semi-independent nations - seems (depressingly) plausible too, though I would have liked a better sense of the sizes and relations of the states and the events by which they came into being.
The main characters are well-drawn and do a good job of illustrating the richness and complexity of Indian culture. For some reason I was most drawn to Shaheen Badoor Khan, a smooth-tongued political advisor with a dark secret, but I also enjoyed Lisa Durnau, an academic who runs a Second-Life-on-steroids virtual world called Alterra, Mr Nandha, a “Krishna cop” tasked with tracking down rogue AIs, his frustrated wife Parvati, and Vikram, a stand-up comic who inherits an industrial conglomerate that is investigating zero-point energy. Other characters include the journalist Nadia, Shiv, a small-time criminal, Thomas Lull, a dropout academic, Tal, a nute (person who has undergone radical surgery to remove all traces of gender) and Aj, a waif with unusual powers.
The challenge of the book comes from the fact that the stories of these characters are told in parallel, forcing the reader to hold multiple plotlines in memory for long periods (in my case, at a chapter or two a night, it was over a week between updates on a particular storyline). It is particularly unfortunate, therefore, that the overarching SF plot that braids them together doesn’t cohere. As with the characters, McDonald has jammed together a number of familiar tropes - AIs out of Neuromancer, a Big Dumb Object in the sky a la Arthur C. Clarke or Greg Bear, parallel universes from just about everybody - into a plot that wouldn’t be out of place on Dr Who. There are some original ideas; the concept of nutes is interesting and well explored through the viewpoint of Tal, and the development of AIs as characters in virtual soaps is a nice touch. The climax, however, seems forced, with the motivations of many of the characters becoming obscure as the plot picks up pace, and is not as transcendant, original and - well - Indian, as I’d been hoping for. Having invested so much time in the characters, I would have also liked rather more happy endings than you get.
Basically, McDonald has captured the diversity of India but in doing so has sacrificed the internal logic of his story. Nonetheless this is a big, rich and atmospheric book, and if I’d been able to read it over a shorter period such as a holiday I would probably have enjoyed it more. The rewards are there, but you have to minimise the effort required to achieve them.