To Say Nothing of the Editing
Blackout, Connie Willis' latest book, is basically what happens when an author gets popular enough to slip her editors.
To Say Nothing of the Dog was pretty brilliant. Remember the feeling of barely controlled Victorian chaos? She was good at writing that, and then it all came smartly to resolution in the late part of the book.
In Blackout she updates that to barely controlled wartime chaos, and then writes it for 500 pages. Nothing is actually resolved in those pages, the protagonists just lurch from one chaos to the next. The sequel might actually bother to resolve anything, but I won't hold my breath.
It's basically like the beginning of the earlier, better book, but blown out to full book size and with three times the protagonists larding it up. Their stories, while totally distinct in detail, are basically identical in feel, and if you were to squint a little you can't tell them apart at all.
If this book had a protagonist it might have finished in one book and been good. Possibly she was trying to invoke the size and intensity of the chaos of wartime... she should have chosen a better way than just multiplying standard chaos by three.
I like Connie Willis usually, but by about 2/3 of the way through the book I started skimming more and more, and 9/10 through I just flipped to the end.
To Say Nothing of the Dog was pretty brilliant. Remember the feeling of barely controlled Victorian chaos? She was good at writing that, and then it all came smartly to resolution in the late part of the book.
In Blackout she updates that to barely controlled wartime chaos, and then writes it for 500 pages. Nothing is actually resolved in those pages, the protagonists just lurch from one chaos to the next. The sequel might actually bother to resolve anything, but I won't hold my breath.
It's basically like the beginning of the earlier, better book, but blown out to full book size and with three times the protagonists larding it up. Their stories, while totally distinct in detail, are basically identical in feel, and if you were to squint a little you can't tell them apart at all.
If this book had a protagonist it might have finished in one book and been good. Possibly she was trying to invoke the size and intensity of the chaos of wartime... she should have chosen a better way than just multiplying standard chaos by three.
I like Connie Willis usually, but by about 2/3 of the way through the book I started skimming more and more, and 9/10 through I just flipped to the end.