Saturday, December 9

Today I finished reading The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts, which is the best novelisation of the ideas of Kant that I have ever read.

It has a somewhat “look at me” structure that includes more or less alternating chapters of the main narrative and related stories from different times and places, which all (kind of) seep back into the main story. Some of the related stories come from the future and some from the past, and all of them get written in different voices or different registers. This gets a little over-showy after a while. The lengthy side story set in medieval England comes in pastiche contemporary language with much overuse of Capital Letteres and and related sentence construction.

I looked at the reviews on goodreads.com and they seem completely divided, as I expected, between those who seem appalled (because they had expected a ripping yarn set in the Antarctic, as the cover and blurb might lead you to expect) and those who think it succeeds wonderfully. A small minority, to which I belong, think it works but not as well as it should have done.

And no, I did not manage to get through the section which Roberts himself describes in the afterword as Molly Bloom-like. I gave myself permission to dip in and out to see if I could find anything that I would need to know later.

I couldn’t.