Book Review - Revenger

RevengerRevenger by Alastair Reynolds
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

So I tried. Very hard. I grabbed this one off Netgalley the moment I saw it, and was quite excited about getting into some contemporary science-fiction. I've not read the author before, but my colleague is a fan.

I made it (struggled) through to 140 pages before giving up the ghost. Sometimes to win, we've got to lose - and that's the call I had to take with this book. I wasn't going to enjoy this book, why continue berating it for being overlong.

We follow the adventures of the Ness sisters, Adrana and Fura, who hop on board Captain Rackamore's ship, the Monetta's Mourn. They are recruited as 'Bone Readers', a particularly difficult but prestigious position to be in. They are affluent teenagers going through a rough patch given their father's still reeling from an investment gone bad.

The Captain seems unfazed that this integral task is being handled by two untried teenagers, and no one calls him out on it. Precious time is wasted training these two girls, but without any context for what their ability is, where it comes from, or how rare it is, we are unable to invest in their success. The writing during the Bone Reading segment does the concept a great disservice. The experience is given in reported speech rather than in active present tense - we never feel the wonder or fear of interacting with the 'Bone'; we are just told what Fura sees and hears.

Things appear to be going as swimmingly as possible when suddenly an old nemesis of Rack's appears one chapter after she's been mentioned and all hell breaks lose. That's also where I stopped, because I couldn't let this book divest me of any more of my time. I did try though.

It is disconcerting to trudge through a book pitted with fascinating terminology such as 'Bone Readers' and 'Bauble Readers' yet come away with a clawing sense of inauthenticity. This is science-fiction through and through, the Ness family even have a robot governess. Yet, the beats are all too cliched.

Written as if for the screen, this book makes for a poor B-movie, with its expository dialogue and wistful passive voice. Every scene is written as if in hindsight; the main protagonist wandering through a haze of the author's preconceived knowledge.

And none of the science makes sense. I can't make out if this book is part of series or a beginning of one, but I couldn't make out where the 'Bone' came from, what they meant by baubles, or any of the world. Engaging with a world that is impossible to understand makes it that much harder to enjoy and this book suffered from that.

The characters lacked depth and interest. I couldn't connect with any of them, least of all the teenaged protagonists (why is everything YA these days). The supporting cast, the little time we read about them, were nothing more than caricatures from previous yarns about life on the sea. It may have worked in a better book, but in this one it was just another layer of tedium.

There are sparks of purple prose, let down by the author's need to colloquialise the syntax of this world. Hence we must suffer through words like lungstuff (air) and glowy (infection), for no valid reason other than to cement the book's place in the sci-fi genre. I pity the proofreader who had to ensure that all the air had gone out of this book - Find/Replace has never been more popular.

The pacing was also completely wrong. Action sequences that should have been bled out were rushed through while meanderings on the ship's crew took up entire chapters. Add to that a pretentious chapter about the protagonist's love for books and you can see why it felt like not happened much in the 140 pages I was able to get through. I don't know if it's just me, but I find that a lot of contemporary writers make a concerted effort to point out how much their characters love books; it's as if one can't possibly sneak in the habit of reading as a character trait - it must be an emphatic proclamation. Subtlety be damned.

Given the steampunk quality of the book and the general storyline, 'Revenger' could have been a stunning read. I was expecting it to be so. But it didn't live up to any expectations. All in all, it feels like a lackadaisical effort at YA science-fiction, and doesn't succeed in the slightest.

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