cedar_grove | I Tried... Really I Did.

As Mother India approaches her centenary, nine people are going about their business - a gangster, a cop, his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set desitner, a journalist, a scientis and a dropout. And so is Aj - the waif, the mind reader, the prophet - when one day she finds a man who wants to stay hidden.

From the blurb of River of Gods by Ian McDonald.

See, just reading the blurb almost makes me want to go back and read the book, but really I did try and after 222 pages I can't take it any more.

I have a very hard time with the fact that it's written in the present rather than the narrative tense. I don't know why I find it so jarring, but I do. Secondly, the fact that there's little or no sustained narrative to help you get into the story, or to come to care about the characters is hard too. Each chapter deals with something concerning one of the characters and just when you start to get to grips with them as characters and get interested in the events, the chapter ends and it's time to advance to the next person's story - and not necessarily in strict rotation, so it somethings means you're waiting ages for the next 'episode.'

Even after over two hundred pages of getting to grips with words like aeis, (A.I's), lighthoeks, (??) and such I'm still no clearer what's going on except that there seem to be a bunch of rogue artificial intelligences going around killing people, there's some kind of alien phenomenon out in space somewhere that scientist are all excited about and some scientific genius is 'on the run' from everybody. Maybe I just missed the point somewhere along the way!

The only character I've even remotely come to 'care' about is 'the wife' who spends her life, it seems, building a rooftop garden as a place to entertain her husband's society friends, because her cop husband doesn't want to have kids. She should maybe just run off with the cricket-loving gardener and have them with him. Maybe she will in the end, but I can't be bothered to wait around and find out.

Can you tell I've lost patience with this book?