Rejected Books
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I tried to read Prophet Song a couple months ago and could tell after a dozen pages I would not be rushing through it before the due date. So I returned it and put it back on hold. It's a Man Booker winner and the great new dystopia.
The Ministry of Time keeps getting lauded as a brilliant bit of science fiction and absolutely hilarious. Comparisons-to-Wodehouse levels of hilarity.
They showed up together at the library midsummer. Perfect timing.
I decided to tackle Ministry first since it was to be a light romp. I mean—when people are comparing you to Wodehouse, I'm expecting jokes on every page. I read over a hundred pages; no jokes. The novel's conceit is fun enough—doomed characters from history are brought to the present just before they would have died. They are assigned a modern person to live with, to help them acclimatize. Also, there's a question as to whether the universe will allow them to exist or not outside their original time.
Bradley has the good sense to not get too deep into the "science" but she seems to think her readers are idiots all the same. Either that or her narrator's an idiot. Every forty pages or so the narrator says something to "you" so I assume there's some reveal as to audience at some point, but whatever.
What The Ministry of Time is best at is revealing the dangers of writing in first person. Were this a third-person novel, a hefty percentage of my complaints would disappear.
But the biggest complaint is that I just could not care. I liked some of the characters but could not believe in their relationships. The world she was building made little sense. The rules the government made for the timetravelers were contradictory. What the characters learned and how they learned and why did not conform to normal human behaviors. If you give this to your Fox News-poisoned uncle, he will find lots of wokeness muddying the narrative and I kinda have to agree. Some elements felt more like a early-2020s-concerns checklist than good fiction. I decided not to take the book with me to Comic-Con and twenty-three hours after our return I found this book, I had completely forgotten I was reading it.
The book I did take was Prophet's Song and I took it entirely because I thought having it as my only book would force me to read it. Not so.
The first issue is the lack of paragraphing and punctuated dialogue. Why? I can see no valid artistic excuse for it. Now, Blindness's lack of paragraphing and punctuation makes sense. It deepens the reader's identification with the people of the novel as they struggle to navigate their world, now that they've lost their ability to see. We feel the same.
(The fact that José Saramago often does this and not just in Blindness, makes me wonder how intentional this effect was, but still.)
What's the point in Prophet Song? I've been able to come up with some reasons I could back up if I were a high-school debater, but let's be honest: they're all b***s***. There is no reason.
Also, I know I only got fifty pages in, but this feels like a dystopia by a guy who hasn't read any. No, that's not right. It reads like a dystopia written by a guy who thinks he's the only one who actually understood Nineteen Eighty-Four and wants to make sure the people of today get access to all the neat ideas in that old thing. That's what it feels like.
Stuff gets explained in lengthy exposition that I understood by the end of page two. This won the Man Booker??? Do the Man Booker judges need someone to explain Orwell to them??
Anyway, reviewers say it ends powerfully but I can't be bothered to get to the end and find out it's as powerful as Ministry of Time is Wodehousian. Or as Ministry of Time is horny/sexy which multiple reviewers have claimed. It's about as horny as a flashing red arrow pointing at waistlevel in an empty subway car.
Good for these writers putting out books that have earned praise.
But ye gods am I depressed.