Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
[...] I have a lot of issues with the book and I'm sure we'll get to them, but there was a lot I enjoyed about it, also. This was absolutely a page-turner, from the start in medias res, to teasing out who the players were, to jumping around in the action and the point of view. The writing evoked action, timing and consequence. [...]
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The problem with
in medias res is the need to go back and catch up. When you're not careful that starts to sound very much like an info dump. The background catch-up for "Paul" (as we knew him in the opening) felt very much like that. We get "Describe, please, in a few well-chosen circuits of the room, the precise circumstances of your unlikely journey from blessed monotony to solitary confinement on a British colonial rock." - to which I added the note "Permit the following info dump". And when we return to the hotel room I felt as if I'd learned very little worth the distraction. Some cliché politician looking for the thrill of being important without any risk - we could easily have worked that out from the subsequent telephone conversations.
Toby's background, after a rough start, became more adroitly blended, even if it did make some of the timing a bit confusing in places, although nothing too serious. (But for all the background we were given, Toby still never became a real person to me, he was always just the cipher through which events were revealed.)
Too much of it seemed like stuff I'd seen on TV too often before. That made it easier to keep up with the time-chopping, because I knew what was coming at pretty much every change, but this didn't lend any suspense or sense of intrigue for me. Even the death of a innocents were what I was expecting (I was hoping for something less predictable, which was about the only suspense I felt through this story). I had hoped he might at least make that part credible, but I really didn't buy the shot while cringing in the dark bit. If there had already been gun fire then maybe, but as the first shorts? While it can be an easy sell to claim Americans can be trigger happy (blame it on your movies), this was stretching things too far for me.