I finished up Peter F. Hamilton's
Great North Road. What an ordeal! I mean that in the best way possible. I often get impatient with big books that don't keep the action rolling a big percentage of the time, but Peter F. Hamilton (and Neal Stephenson) are proof positive that it's not my fault (not entirely anyway). There
ARE writers out there who can capture my undivided attention for nearly 1000 pages without having to resort to non-stop action--explosions, murder, chases, sex, etc...--on every page to do so. There's just apparently not that
many.
This is not an action-packed book. It's a slow burn with lots of twists. Hamilton masterfully gets you to make incorrect assumptions early on and then slowly reveals why your assumptions were wrong (yes, some of those red herrings that were planted early were
clearly red herrings, but that did nothing to dampen my desire to learn "the truth"). Pages were turned.
Great North Road is a near-future (near for Hamilton, anyway) police-procedural, alien boogey-man, arctic expedition, world-spanning mystery full of the stuff that fans of Hamilton have come to love: politics, engaging characters, believable (and plot-relevant) social/military tech, entangled plot-lines, and emotion: the big 'E', goose-pimply,
I-love-it-when-a-plan-comes-together, moist-eye-type emotion. What was
missing (to my delight) was Hamilton's traditional tendency to f**k-up the beginnings of new chapters/POVs/sections with page after page of soul-sucking, eye-glazing info-dumps. Oh, the info was still there! He just did a much better job of dispersing it throughout the narrative.
Given the uniqueness (not to mention the proliferation) of the North family in the story, I'm willing to forgive the fact that the author (or the editor) mistakenly referred to Aldred North as
Abner on at least two occasions. The confusion is hardly surprising given the circumstances.
Favorite (relevant) Quote:
Quote:
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"We already have the technology in the shape of [insert technological advances here] to step beyond the economics that have governed us for the past few hundred years and free us from material concerns. Yet we don’t. The dead hand of society’s inertia and the financial interest of the elite minority hold us back as a species. They govern us so they can continue to govern us."
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TL;DR Version: Bravo!
*slow-claps; Charles Foster Kane style*