Too Like the Lightning

Imagine, reader, that you are the perpetrator of the worst mass murder seen in a utopian society for many years. Imagine that rather than face the ultimate penalty the rest of your days are spent in perpetual penance but in secret, as your very identity poses a risk to your safety. Imagine that you are the one man - or woman, for sex is no hindrance to this - able to balance economies and realities and that you live, almost paradoxically, in a private hive home, surrounded by the humanist and the utopian. The broken and the damned surround you and power flexes itself around you at all times.

Congratulations, reader, for you have placed yourself in the realms of Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer's philisophical 2016 science fiction novel. It is a novel of contradictions, set in a world completely alien to our own 21st century sensibilities.

And perhaps it is that which meant I could not finish it.

This is a strange novel. Not just for its content, which, as I have already said, feels completely out of the realms of the modern man's - or woman's  - experience. But also for its style. Its plot. Its philosophy. This is a novel that can completely alienate the reader, such as yourself, dear reader, if you do not understand its minutiae.

I did not read the novel, it should be said. I listened to it. For twenty hours, my listening was confused and somewhat lost. My questions outweighed my answers. At times, I completely lost track of what was going on. Snippets of sense emerged, but they were few and far between. Despite this, I persevered; it takes something else to defeat me in a quest to read a book such as this.

This curious mix of Thomas More and Frank Herbert (alongside the Marquis De Sade - this is the one thing I wish I was kidding about) attempts to combine future economics and politics with the unbelievable elements of a boy who can animate the inanimate. It is ambitious. It is beautifully written. It also incorporates elements of gender theory - about the only thing I understood - with eighteenth century writing style.

If I have lost you in this review, reader, I apologise. You are my master in this and I should not have let you down. But this emulation of the written style does not include how unreliable Mycroft, our first person narrator, is. Or does it? Certainly this is a pale imitation of it, bereft of many of the ideosyncracies that actually made the style interesting to listen to even when it was impenetrable.

I did not enjoy Too Like the Lightning, but I do not regret having read it. Perhaps this is a book to be pored over rather than listened to - in the car, no less, dear reader. It may be a book that rewards the tooth-combing reader who can understand the philosophy and the seemingly plotless nature of the novel. I cannot make a judgement for you, though, dear reader, and I would encourage you to form your own judgement rather than rely on my unreliable perspective.