Lev Grossman: Codex (2004, RB Large Print)
440 pages
English language
Published July 5, 2004 by RB Large Print.
This was a fair mystery; although the ending seemed convoluted and incomplete. The saddest of all is that the novel had the potential to be quite mysterious and intriguing.
The Magician series is much better, inventive, and a better investment of time.
Meandering and meaningless, there are some really beautiful bits of book here. I think if you keep your expectations low (as I did going into it), you might find this enjoyable.
The characters are paper thin, and the main character especially, swings wildly from incompetence to thinking himself near genius (though we have only some flimsy back story as evidence for this opinion).
The central plot revolves around an improbable quest dolled out to the hero for mysterious (and no doubt nefarious) purposes, to procure a mid-evil era manuscript. This actually does resolve itself fairly interestingly, and about the last third or fourth of the novel becomes pretty easy to get sucked into. (That's about the point at which I read to completion in one late-night sitting.)
But the thing I found most interesting was a strange and beautifully depicted video game, seemingly transplanted into the novel, and which the …
Meandering and meaningless, there are some really beautiful bits of book here. I think if you keep your expectations low (as I did going into it), you might find this enjoyable.
The characters are paper thin, and the main character especially, swings wildly from incompetence to thinking himself near genius (though we have only some flimsy back story as evidence for this opinion).
The central plot revolves around an improbable quest dolled out to the hero for mysterious (and no doubt nefarious) purposes, to procure a mid-evil era manuscript. This actually does resolve itself fairly interestingly, and about the last third or fourth of the novel becomes pretty easy to get sucked into. (That's about the point at which I read to completion in one late-night sitting.)
But the thing I found most interesting was a strange and beautifully depicted video game, seemingly transplanted into the novel, and which the main character gets rather hopelessly (and a characteristically) addicted to for the duration of the novel's timeframe (a few weeks). It's not really realistically depicted, though probably enough so for non- (or casual) gamers, but the plot of the game, when it's finally revealed, is pretty interesting. I would probably have rather read an entire novelization of its contents than the rest of the book, to be honest.
