I'm sure the name Kage Baker has come up recently, possibly in a list of nominees, or perhaps she is one of those hot young writers that are friends of friends of friends, and I see her name whilst browsing the blogs of friends of friends. You know?
Anyway, I saw The Life of the World to Come on the New Books Shelf at my new town library (much much smaller and less magnificent than my former town library, although still pretty cool for a town this size) and picked it up. Glad I did. Yes, it's frustrating as hell. There was a point about two hundred and fifty pages in, with less than a hundred pages to go, where I said to my Best Reader "I'm just at the fulcrum where things will really start to happen fast. Or they'd better, anyway." They didn't. Oh, two or three Big Things happened after that, but the book ended at a cliffhanger, without resolving the major plot point. I prefer, on the whole, if the major plot point is resolved, and then a new major plot point is introduced (or even better, a minor plot point is promoted) for the cliffhanger.
Or that's how I read it. The introduction is from the point of view of Mendoza, who has an affair with the protagonist (more than one, but I'm simplifying) and risks her, well, not her life, or her liberty, or certainly her happiness, but her, um, comfort? Well, anyway, risks whatever she has left to risk in order to help out the protagonist (who I'll call Alec, since that's the name he uses most often). Then the book goes back through Alec's extraordinary life up until his affair with Mendoza, which is about two hundred and fifty pages in. A trifle later, Mendoza begins to pay for her risks, and Alec decides to save her, adding that rescue to his overall goal as described at the beginning of the book. Neither that rescue nor the overall goal are achieved before the end of the book.
It's possible, I suppose, to read the book as mostly concerned with Alec's discovery of who he Really Is, which he does accomplish and more or less assimilate. Yes, Alec is Not Who He Seems, and his parents are not his real parents, and he needs to be taken away from the not-real parents in order for his unique genetic (designed rather than hereditary) abilities to blossom and bear fruit. Yep. Nor is this tired old trope brought in for it's ironic value; the book does not seem to comment on its use, but just takes it for granted. O Superman.
But that's a lot of griping for a book that YHB actually quite enjoyed. The world is fun and funny, the writing is sharp and pleasantly referential (meaning that I get the references). The characters are good, particularly the AI pirate captain. Like 1984 (deliberately?) it's clear that there are two classes, and we spend all our time with the upper class, finding out almost nothing about the lower, except for a few rules that apply to them but not to our characters. There's a nice bit of, um, satire? farce? —anyway, a nice layer in the story about how everything is outlawed (marijuana, alcohol, coffee, tea, meat, dairy, etc) but somehow everybody is able to get them. I don't know whether supposed to be a comment on prohibition generally, or just a running gag, but it's lovely. Even the three-men-in-a-boat buffoons who drink colored water for tea and prune juice for claret start unauthorized fires, eat forbidden cheese and (horrors!) walk on the grass. They do so with impunity, of course; nobody in all the book gets punished for drinking, smoking, meat-eating, or any of the other things that the everpresent public health monitors are supposed to be preventing.
One more thing to mention: lately when I read a specfic novel, I often catch an image and think "that's the image the author built the book around." You know, the moment that comes first to the author, the one that makes the author say "how could I write a story with that image in it?" I don't know if I peg the write one, or even if the particular author writes that way, but in this one it's very clearly (to YHB) the moment when the river suddenly roils and reveals what appears to be a giant bottle appears, spinning on its long axis, which slows its rotation and splits, a force field coming down to reveal a three-masted sailing ship. It's a terrific image, and well worth writing a book around, particularly an entertaining one like this.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.