Bull, Emma - Bone Dance
Tue, Mar. 29th, 2005 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterI ended up getting a good two-thirds of the way through this book before realizing that I had absolutely no idea what was going on and who all these characters were. It made a lot more sense the second time round. I figure reading things on five hours of sleep generally doesn't lead to greater comprehension.
The book takes place in post-nuclear-holocaust America -- sometime in the distant past, the US government developed mind control weapons. The Horsemen are humans who can somehow hijack another person's mind and knowledge (they call this "riding" a person, though I think that sounds very sketchy ^_~), and one of them or a group of them pushed the button that set off the nukes down in South America. Sparrow, the protagonist, is a trader dealing in pre-war videos and CDs and other assorted media, and one of the things I like about the world is this sense of something lost.
No one reads the old books anymore in this world, because no one has access to them. The man controlling the city Sparrow lives in controls not only the source of electricity and power, but also knowledge.
The book felt very noirish to me -- something in Sparrow's cynicism and the harsh lives of the other characters, along with the feeling that so much was happening underground, outside of the eyes of the law. But like much noir, I didn't feel very connected to the characters, and because of that, I don't think the ending quite worked for me. Bull doesn't take the usual noir ending (if I am reading this correctly as noir, which is questionable) of darkness and despair and increasingly grey morality; instead, Sparrow doesn't stay disconnected from the world, and much of the plot hinges on this point. Anti-noir? Not sure. But not enough of an anti-noir to make me care about the characters, some of whom felt a little cardboard at times. I also couldn't really understand why so many people ended up allying themselves with Sparrow, given that Sparrow is really not the nicest of people in the beginning.
Plus, I liked Frances a great deal and was sad that she wasn't in more of the book.
I'm still glad I got it, because it's a very different sort of book than I usually read, but I'm not quite sure if I liked it or not.
The book takes place in post-nuclear-holocaust America -- sometime in the distant past, the US government developed mind control weapons. The Horsemen are humans who can somehow hijack another person's mind and knowledge (they call this "riding" a person, though I think that sounds very sketchy ^_~), and one of them or a group of them pushed the button that set off the nukes down in South America. Sparrow, the protagonist, is a trader dealing in pre-war videos and CDs and other assorted media, and one of the things I like about the world is this sense of something lost.
No one reads the old books anymore in this world, because no one has access to them. The man controlling the city Sparrow lives in controls not only the source of electricity and power, but also knowledge.
The book felt very noirish to me -- something in Sparrow's cynicism and the harsh lives of the other characters, along with the feeling that so much was happening underground, outside of the eyes of the law. But like much noir, I didn't feel very connected to the characters, and because of that, I don't think the ending quite worked for me. Bull doesn't take the usual noir ending (if I am reading this correctly as noir, which is questionable) of darkness and despair and increasingly grey morality; instead, Sparrow doesn't stay disconnected from the world, and much of the plot hinges on this point. Anti-noir? Not sure. But not enough of an anti-noir to make me care about the characters, some of whom felt a little cardboard at times. I also couldn't really understand why so many people ended up allying themselves with Sparrow, given that Sparrow is really not the nicest of people in the beginning.
Plus, I liked Frances a great deal and was sad that she wasn't in more of the book.
I'm still glad I got it, because it's a very different sort of book than I usually read, but I'm not quite sure if I liked it or not.
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