Somone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

I'm going to stop announcing that I'm running late, because I always am.

Sometimes, particularly when I'm trying to figure out what to say on these things, I like to look at the negative Amazon reviews on things I sort-of liked. There's a big theme in the neg reviews about how Cory Doctorow apparently thinks he's the James Joyce of Canada. I have to wonder where that came from--was there a pro review that made that comparison? It isn't in any of the blurbs on my copy. Regardless, anyone who would make such a comparison must have never read any Joyce, and perhaps has heard of him only by rough description. Because while SCtT, SLT is a bit confusing, it's in a completely un-Joycean way.

The narrative style is very straightforward. There's a main narrative, and flashbacks--a style that anyone who has ever watched television should be able to handle just fine. Part of the difficulty comes in the story's use of magical realism. The main character, who seems to be a fairly ordinary guy who's busy renovating a house he just bought, reveals early on that his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine. Literally. He and two of his brothers are ordinary humans (except that one brother can see the future, and the other is a walking corpse). Another brother is an island (I guess he takes after their father) and three others are a set of living nesting dolls (they can walk around separate from each other, but only the center one has internal organs; the others are hollow). The narrator reveals this information and then moves on to discuss how he got to know his neighbors (who seem basically normal, but one also has a magical-realism related secret).

Not much later, it develops that the dead brother was killed by the other brothers, and the flashbacks tell the story of the narrator's coming-of-age, and explain why the other brothers killed the dead one (hint: he's a sociopath).

Meanwhile, in the main plot, the narrator goes about settling into his new neighborhood. He teams up with a local small business owner who is working on a project to blanket their neighborhood in free wireless. At the same time, the reanimated corpse of the dead brother has returned from the dead and is causing problems for the narrator, the other brothers, and his neighbors and associates. And there is the second cause of the novel's difficulty. While both the walking-corpse-brother plot and the free wireless plot are written in a perfectly clear and readable style (again, completely un-Joycean, there is no stream-of-consciousness narration here, and very little obscure symbolism), how--or indeed if--these two plots are related remains obscure. There's something going on with themes of isolation versus connectedness (the brothers, naturally, had an isolated and unusual upbringing, and the narrator is the only one who has had much success joining normal society), but it's not drawn out particularly well, and the ending seems to undercut that theme pretty spectacularly.

I also remain baffled by the free wireless project. Even though the shop-owner character gets several author-on-board speeches *to explain why it's so great and revolutionary (trying to talk the phone company and the neighborhood anarchist bookstore, respectively, into supporting the project), I still don't get it. The general idea seems to be that people will be able to communicate without using The Man's Telephone Wires. Instead, he makes transmitters to do wireless internet over radio waves, out of pieces he gets out of the dumpster and has assembled by gutter punks. It seems roughly equivalent to if someone in the pre-computer age had decided to promote free communication by hand-making paper in their garage and handing it out to everyone in the neighborhood--while at the same time, better paper was available for a low cost from a variety of sources that don't particularly care what gets written on it.

From what I know, it's the companies that provide hosting that occasionally like to exercise some small measure of control over what's posted (see, for instance, Strikethrough 07), not the ones that provide the actual connection from your personal computer to the internet. But maybe there's something I'm missing--perhaps, and this is just occuring to me as I write this, if one obtained one's own servers from which to host one's, dunno, Naked Anarchist Archive, one might have trouble locating an ISP that wanted one's business. Maybe. But even given that possibility, it still seems like handing out paper that you made in your garage.

Anyway, three plots, one of which is mildly annoying in places but still very readable, not particularly well integrated. The novel, like all of Cory Doctorow's work, can be read for free at his website. (Which is cool, except that it sort of seems like he thinks any author who doesn't do the same is kind of a tool. Personally, I'm not at all opposed to the expectation that people should be paid for creative work, and it seems like if his model catches on, both publishers and the general public will be increasingly unwilling to do so. But I don't know--could be he's studied this and I'm wrong.)

* I could swear Cory Doctorow used to be on TV Tropes** as an example of either writer-on-board or Author Fillibuster, or both, but he seems to be gone now. It's a wiki; go figure. Hamlet's still on there, though.
**If you're not familiar with the site, I suggest blocking out several hours to spend there before you click the links. It sucks you in.