Sunday, August 13, 2006

Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumey.

Mobius Dick (Amazon link)

A while ago (link) I wrote about how I didn't know whether it was me our the book at fault when I found myself losing interest in Mobius Dick.

Well I finished it on holiday in Anglesey and I've decided it's definitely the book at fault.
It was meant to be a:
"dazzlingly inventive story that blends techno-thriller, historical fantasy,
philosophy and farce"
It was actually non of these things.
It was a big mess of badly constructed ideas & all of these badly constructed ideas were then pretty poorly executed. I was really hoping for great things from this and I was bloody disappointed.
The basic idea was that John Ringer receives a mysterious text message which then takes him in search of a woman he used to know. On the way we journey through the work of Schrodinger, Mann, Schumann, Melville and more. Until the end, where the quantum theories and parallel world theories come crashing down to end the story in a deeply disappointing manner.
I've read countless comic book explanations of this sort of thing and even the worst of them was better than this.

Ho hum, onwards to a bit of Martin Amis now....

(Update - the Amis will have to wait, 50 pages in. It's Matthew Reilly time!)

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