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Unsurprisingly for a Pulitzer winner, this book is phenomenal.

I thoroughly enjoyed the story. It's equal parts thriller, satire, and meditation grappling with the complexity of discovering one's identity. Both in terms of the title character's split allegiances and the struggle of his fellow refugees, but also in terms of Vietnam and America reshaping (or failing to reshape) their conceptions of self once the Vietnam War ended.

I'll admit I was skeptical about the writing style at first. The book is written almost as if spoken, sort of weaving and tangenting naturally. Nguyen also eschews some basic English style (like giving proper names, or having quotation marks and spacing to denote someone speaking) which can be a pretentious warning flag. Once you're immersed in the story, however, it's hard to imagine it written any other way and the natural flow and thriller pacing makes this book extremely hard to put down.

I hated this book and, for the record, I didn't finish it.

I get that Covenant is not likable on purpose. The whole idea that attracted me to this book is that Covenant doesn't "opt in" when the call to adventure is thrust upon him and for about 50 pages it was nice to have a protagonist that was such a miserable prick.

But then Covenant rapes Lena. At that point I took a long hard look at the book, read another 100 pages or so to see what consequences fell out, and then decided to cut my losses.

I can appreciate that Donaldson was trying to push the boundaries of fantasy by defying a ton of hero tropes, but - at least for me - he didn't have the skill to actually make a good story out of it. Covenant is inexplicably transported to The Land, a name which reflects the utterly boilerplate nature of this fantasy world, and is helped by a bunch of people that read like cardboard cutouts to defeat Lord Foul, another name which might as well be Lord Badguy Placeholder.

The prose is just as devoid of interest as the setting and characters. Donaldson's style is dusty and most of the time not very evocative. When the characters of the Land speak it's in this stilted fantasy accent that made my brain flatline. If Covenant wasn't such an ass this book would have just been unimaginative and boring instead of torturously frustrating.

I gave this book 200 pages to pique my interest and after that long there was just nothing that could provoke me to turn another page except picking up a totally different book.

There are the bones of a good story here. Morgan's key technology (the ability to transfer your consciousness into another body - a "sleeve") is really cool and he did a good job showing us a society that's different but also very similar to our own. The book is written in a classically hard-boiled style, and like a lot of that Chandler/Hammett source material tends to be simultaneously terse and abstract, and when the book is working, it's great.

Unfortunately, there's more than a few places in this book that threw me off when reading them. Confusing or half-working metaphors, characters from 200 pages back that are re-introduced without sufficient callbacks (like, say, having a name). In my opinion this books is about 100 pages too long and would have been well served by another run through an editor. I also want to note that there's a couple of graphic sex scenes and while I appreciate the fact that Morgan included a bit of eroticism, the sexiest part of hard boiled stories / film noir is the sizzling energy between the main character and his femme fatale. In this respect, as well as a lot of the others, the book falls victim to telling and not showing and it sort of comes off cheap.

Lastly, I held off on judgment of this book until I completed it, in case the end really tied it together. Instead the ending was way too predictable with virtually everyone getting exactly what was coming to them.

At the half way point I was completely in love with the setting of this book, I couldn't put it down, and then towards the end it becomes truly mind blowing. The only reason that this isn't a 5/5 for me is that I feel like the ending was satisfying, but it left a lot of things implied without delving into the consequences enough after the fact.

Still a great work of fiction and absolutely recommended.


To elaborate, we spend all of this time building a great world and dealing with the reactions to a sudden alien visitation, and like 90% of the way through we find Rhetors and Incanters are real, which is incredible and yet believable in this completely non-magical world... then after the Convox is evacuated and everyone splits into cells, and the space mission, and Fraa Jad obviously altering the worldtrack into one of the rare ones in which Arbre and the Geometers make peace... but after all of this takes place, there's virtually no discussion of the consequences of these people existing.

Erasmas et. al. all know that their perception of what happened doesn't line up with what everyone else perceived, and perhaps we're supposed to assume that their brains slowly altered to come into agreement with everyone else but I don't think that was directly stated and since the book itself is implied to exist in world (Erasmas having "started this record" when he was being punished I believe) that might not even be internally consistent.

I just would have preferred for this information to be gone over a bit more in dialog with the other avout, because the existence of these hyper powerful avout is pretty world breaking.

Instead, the Everything Killer situation kind of became a dead end and we get this very sweet, movie-like (which Stephenson even lampshades in the final sentence) ending to the book.