hawkwing_lb: (Default)
hawkwing_lb ([personal profile] hawkwing_lb) wrote2009-12-29 04:29 pm

Books 2009: nothing for the enemy

Books 2009: 110


110. Stephen Hunt, The Kingdom Beyond the Waves.

Stephen Hunt writes very strange books. Which is not to say I don't enjoy them, but I stopped reading this halfway through six months ago and only decided to finish it now because it's bad luck to end the year with a book half-read.

It'd work better if it were a film. Because then the strange and impenetrable distance that lies between the reader and the characters wouldn't matter so much: they are opaque in their motivations, unconvincing, for the most part, as human beings.

And yet the book itself is interesting, a hurly-burly race in discovery of ancient ruins, and then to save the world: steammen and flying people and crab-like people and people people and all manner of weirdness, explosions, and battles. Also doom, death, terror, horror, dread.

Very strange book.