| Nova Swing | Contributor: Edwin | Posted: 18/02/07 | 09:32 |
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page 4 of 4 As the story progresses, we realise that several of the characters are actually these supernatural creations of the event site, and they’ve merely adapted superior coping skills and found a place to sleep. Increasingly, you begin to wonder if any of the characters portrayed are indeed human. In the end, it seems as though the author chooses random fates for his characters, aside from an unlikely trio, who in the closing pages start up a small-time freight business in a brand new starship. Things are at times laboriously explained, and we are all too often given a single character’s perceptions with stream-of-consciousness detail. At the same time, vital moments of conflict are smoothed by a poetic vagueness. As the story closes, no satisfactory conclusions are drawn. Harrison seems to eschew neat conclusions or themes like justice, karma and order. Our heroes are respectively decimated, lost forever, or transform inexplicably into beasts. No answers are provided for the list of conundrums and questions his world raises. Yet, certain azure images and themes will remain with you. A curious stampede of pure black and white cats, which daily scamper up and down Straint street at sunrise and sunset, like a vast stream of fur. The cats pour from inside the event site, and return there at nightfall, a baffling congregation of statistically improbable dimensions, pouring past the doors of Liv Hula’s bar, a sort of Boulevard of Broken Dreams, where our heroes while away their days. Parts haunting, parts baffling, this is a book that leave you thoughtful. And hopefully keen to check out the first book set in the universe of the Kefahuchi Tract, Light. Suck it and see. three out of five
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