Eon | ||||||||
Greg Bear | ||||||||
Gollancz, 503 pages | ||||||||
|
A review by Alma A. Hromic
And you have to concentrate on the storyline, because the background is so horrendously complex, so filled with technobabble,
that while the book does stretch your mind in order to understand all this, it also has the narcotic effect of
overkill. I found myself jerked back into the story every now and then when something actually happened in between
long discussions of what various tunnels, lighting fixtures, assorted machinery and various airlocks look like, and
the sociological schism between the Cold War pawns on the this particular chessboard and the politics practiced by
the other denizens of Thistledown which are so far off the scale that it seems as they are trying to counter the
chess moves while playing by the rules of quite a different -- and frequently verging on the
incomprehensible -- game. There are glorious moments in this book -- when Vasquez discovers the secret of the
seventh chamber, for instance -- but you need to slog to get to them. The book feels alternately too short -- like there
is vital information that is missing, and which would justify the tough passages you've just had to struggle through
in the previous 450 pages -- and too long, in that judicious editing could probably have reduced the size of the
monster by at least a third and without losing anything in the process.
And editing it needs, at some of the most fundamental levels. A (male) character by the name of Rimskaya is described
as "half-Russian" -- and then his strange (feminine) name is given as due to the fact that his GRANDmother (which
would make him a quarter Russian, at the very least) was an immigrant and her name was applied for on the US entry
papers for her son (would this be our character? Or his father?). Rimskaya is an overwhelmingly feminine name (the
male equivalent would probably be Rimsky), and it is unlikely that it would have been allowed to linger long in an
Americanized situation, where it would have either been anglicized in spelling or else corrected to its proper
Russian root. But worse than this -- which, admittedly, is a quibble from a reader familiar with Russian naming
conventions and for whom this thoroughly unnecessary bit of (wrong) character detail is jarring in the
extreme -- is the uncorrected fact that this immigrant grandmother was a "widower". If an egregious error at
this kind of basic language level had been allowed to slip through in the first pass, twenty years ago, surely
re-issuing the book in the Classics series would have been a good time to fix such slips?
There are people out there who are devoted to Eon, and hold it up as one of the best of its kind. For
me -- it has all the technical overkill of some of the worst-afflicted Larry Niven books, with very little character
development as a redeeming leaven. It might be a classic, but not all classics stand the test of time too well. This
book, despite its scattered points of brilliance, just reads tired, and dated.
Alma A. Hromic, addicted (in random order) to coffee, chocolate and books, has a constant and chronic problem of "too many books, not enough bookshelves". When not collecting more books and avidly reading them (with a cup of coffee at hand), she keeps busy writing her own. Her latest fantasy work, a two-volume series entitled Changer of Days, was published by HarperCollins. |
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