When the great crash happened it was nothing like we feared. There was no panic. No tears. Mostly just slammed fists and swearing. The Internet was down, and hitting refresh didn't work. "Ctrl, alt, delete" was also useless. No one had Internet. Anywhere.
In Notes From The
Internet Apocalypse, the net has stopped working. As an entire generation of
Twitterites, Facebook afficianados, Chatroulette zombies and redditers descend
into the street to find some way of recreating the online experience in the
real world, three unlikely heroes join together and set off on a quest to bring
the wifi back...
Like anyone who
has a blog or lives online, the thought of the Internet vanishing leaves me in
a cold sweat! J A couple of days
without connecting is difficult enough, but to have no more access whatsoever
to all my favourite sites and the constant background noise of the Worldwide
Web is a terrifying thought. One that Wayne Gladstone takes and runs with. When
I saw the book on a rundown of sf and fantasy novels released this year, I was
immediately taken in both by the clever cover and the great blurb.
Unfortunately the book wasn’t as much of a touchdown than I had hoped.
And yet it
started so well... As the book opens we are introduced to Gladstone the
narrator who proceeds to tell us about this world a tiny jump, skip and hop
away from our own, where overnight the internet has stopped working. In these
early pages, the sheer inventiveness and clever humour that Mr Gladstone brings
to creating his world carried me along. From Youtube zombies who force real
cats to do trick after trick until they die, to twitter addicts who only speak
in tweets, the bitingly dark humour works. While snorting at the outrageous extent
people go to to recapture the online world offline, there is still a certain
uneasiness as you wonder just how farfetched a lot of this really is.
Unfortunately,
this inventiveness did not necessarily translate to either the plot or the
characters. Gladstone, our narrator, takes a very long time to take on any kind
of active role in what is happening, beyond stumbling around sex clubs looking
for his friends. Those two friends are never clearly painted and it is
difficult to tell exactly how real they are nor what their actual goals are in
relation to Gladstone.
The book kept me
going though, through the murky middle parts and towards what seemed to be
building towards an interesting, even exciting end. This is where Mr Gladstone
the writer lost me completely, though. Awash in a series of confusing events
and cypher explanations, not at all helped by the detachment of the narrator
who never quite connected emotionally (with me at least), I ended the book
completely lost. I still have no idea what the ending was and what it was
supposed to mean, nor how much of it was real and how much we are supposed to
believe went on in Gladstone the narrator’s mind.
A fabulously
inventine and ironic look at our world and just how we might react
to the loss of what has become such an important part of our lives we can’t
imagine living without it, Notes From the Internet Apocalypse failed to grab my
attention in terms of character or plot and left me confused and irritated by
the ending. I gave this 2.5 /b/tards out of 5.
From the Blogosphere:
From the Author's Mouth:
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire