Amusingly, I read this book because I had just finished something I need to review for NoaF, and wanted to read something I didn’t plan to review, to tide me over until I had written that all up. Alas, I am hoisted by the petard of my own opinionated-ness.
But! In my defence, this book absolutely demanded a blog post. It is an incredibly interesting book, on a lot of axes, and I felt like what that meant – and what the choice to describe it as “interesting” rather than anything else meant – really needed to be explored… so here we go. I’m doing this instead of baking pumpkin loaf, which should tell you everything you need to know about how utterly compelled to write I was.
To start with, “interesting” is a fun way to describe a book. Often, when I say a book is “interesting”, that exists necessarily in opposition to it being good. An interesting book is a bad one, but one where there are merits aside from its failings. An interesting book is one where I dislike it, but in a way that makes me think, makes me want to talk about it. Or maybe I’m just trying to be polite to the person who recommended it to me, but don’t want to lie and say I liked it when… I did not. That’s also an option. I am sorry all the friends to whom I am hopelessly unsubtle in my book opinions. But anyway. To some extent, I think the same holds true here – I gave The Book Eaters three stars, and I think there are definite problems with it – but at the same time, I do think it is genuinely interesting, in the traditional usage of the word, especially in a meta sense, in its themes and how they fit into the SFF landscape in general.
The story follows Devon, a book eater, raised in an oppressive, patriarchal society that is separate from humans, and her quest to save her son from various dangers that result from the structure and mores of that society. It is a story very much about a mother’s love for her child, the lengths to which one will go for that love, and what the risk of the loss of a child will do to one, psychologically and personally. And I do not remember the last time I read an SFF novel in which we got motherhood like this from the perspective of the mother. Mothers who sacrifice for their children are, more often than not, the mother of the main character, and thus a motivational driver, or a source of sorrow or salvation or both, but they’re not whose head we live in. We don’t get to see the costs of the things the mother has done for the child, only the child’s gratitude or grief, which strips it of some of the moral greyness, because it’s all tied up in the emotionality of someone separate from the acts themselves. But with Devon, we get to be inside her head while she does some really quite shitty things for the sake of her son. And that is really very interesting.
In many ways, Devon is a great character – she is someone who is driven to a really untenable position by the society she lives in and the people around her, and has to make some appalling choices with no good options on the table in front of her. She’s deeply morally grey, and the weight of that greyness lives with her throughout the book. Or… well, I’ll come back to this.
In the abstract, this is a thing I am incredibly glad there’s a book about. Yeah, I know, you can all hear the “but” circling.
But. But… I don’t think the book lives up to the promise of its premise in terms of craft. I found myself, after putting it down, defending the ideas to myself against the criticism of the writing, which falls down for me primarily in two areas.
Firstly, the plot. At first, it all seems pretty decent and interesting. Things happen, they make sense, they’re relatively well-explained (if sometimes horrific) and it’s all good. But towards the end, the last quarter or so, everything somewhat spirals out of control. The whole situation becomes weirdly overcomplicated, to the extent that I start to doubt the plausibility of it all. And yes, I know, it’s a story with book vampires, but it’s also a story with people in it who act according to their own personalities and previous actions, and some of it begins to strain my belief based on who everyone has previously shown themself to be. As an analogy, to avoid spoiling what actually happens, it reminded me somewhat of those stories, where towards the end, all the dramas and upsets of the stories are revealed to have been the doing of the bad guy all along (cackling optional), and he’s managed to somehow plan out the full course of events, trapping the protagonists in his diabolical schemes. And sometimes, you have those reveals and your first instinct is to go “wait a minute, but they only ended up on that island because the weather changed, how did he plan for that?” or “but if that seagull hadn’t stolen her chips, she’d have never gone into the shop in the first place!”. It’s not about nitpicking the plot so much as being expected to believe a ridiculous amount of control, with that control never having been hinted to you before the big reveal. It’s too big of an ask.
And this situation isn’t quite that, but the narrative changes, or rather the parameters change, several times throughout the book, and by the final reveal, I found myself in a similar position of doubt, of there having been too many “but wait, actually…” moments for me to be carried along in belief of them all. My suspension would only last so far, and no further.
But that could just be a me problem. Maybe I’m too much of a nitpicker. It’s possible. The second point though, and the one I found far more of a problem, was the characters, especially the secondary characters. This isn’t the only issue, but what really stuck out is that for a lot of them… we don’t get the emotional part of their interactions with Devon. Or… we do, but not really. I suppose the best way to explain it is it felt like I’d been given the plot summary of their interactions, the sequential list of what Dean wanted to achieve in writing them, something like:
- Protag meets person
- Person is polite to protag (while everyone else is a bag of dicks)
- Protag is warily optimistic of person (what if trap??)
- Person provides opportunity for bonding with protag
- They bond
- A bad thing happens and they cope together
- Person did not betray protag – it is not a trap!
- FRIENDS!
Which is a perfectly legitimate sequence of events, but engenders no emotion in me. And I felt like that in a lot of Devon’s interactions with others – they make sense, they’re a very reasonable set of things happening in an order that works – but somehow none of the personality of anyone involved made it through either. It’s all scaffolding and no filler. Which feels extra weird, because there are the scenes where that filler would/should have happened but it’s just sort of… not there?
And this loops a little back round to Devon and her moral greyness. She is, as I said, a very interesting character precisely because she’s incredibly morally grey. She’s done some frankly appalling things, but for explicable reasons, and that should occupy a big, emotive zone. But it doesn’t… really. Some of this is that the plot moves too quickly to leave her with space to sit with those big emotions. There’s a lot going on in her life, having an existential crisis would get in the way of not dying and so on, I can’t fault her for that. But given that the core of the book is so much about how she has done some horrible things for the sake of the love of her child, I think I would have benefitted from having some more time to watch the toll those decisions have taken on her unfold. It’s not that they completely do not – she clearly does not feel like she’s even remotely a good person anymore, and you see that play out in her conversations with her son – but you don’t see as much emotional fallout from it as I think I needed to be really sold on it, mainly because she mostly seems settled that everything she has done, while awful, was necessary for the sake of her son. Which might be true, but I’d expect a little more angsting about it anyway.
It also affects the antagonists of the book. There are… approximately four antagonists, sort of sequentially, and I would consider at least three of them to be so over the top evil that they become a sort of caricature. And that’s… not great. I can sort of see a logic where, when you have a protagonist who’s quite morally grey, you need the antagonists to be clearly worse than her so you don’t lose the reader’s allegiance. If the protagonist and the antagonist(s) are all approximately in the same moral zone, it would be all too easy for people to start going “hmmm, but what if Dr. McEvil had a point there?”. And there are ways around that – maybe you make the protagonist very personally compelling, even while they’re morally dubious – but I can see how this might be a logic that leaves you with some extremely, horrifically shitty bad guys. The problem is, they’re so shitty, it feels like someone came up with a list of “shittiest traits” to assign to them, and so they don’t feel like people, they feel like constructs, and so you relate to them as such, as abstract forces for bad happenings rather than people who made the happenings by their choices and selves, and can be related to emotionally as people*. Some of this is by design – we’re in a world where a lot of them don’t really see the protagonist as a proper person, so why would they relate to her as one – but that design has this drawback that felt, at lest to me, like it needed compensating for. We needed to see enough of a side of them that behaved relatably to truly hate them for their cruelties, to make them human enough to hate.
What it ultimately comes down to is that this was a book I found intellectually pleasing, but emotionally unsatisfying. I am, more than anything else, an emotional reader driven by my feelings particularly for characters, and so, on the whole, that lost this book for me. But I keep coming back to that core theme, how unusual it is, how glad I am to see it, and how much else in this book is unusual – a character brought up in isolation who doesn’t really manage to get over the effects that has on her, a mother who not only lives, but gives us her own perspective, a narrative about survival that really shows us what survival can cost in grim circumstances. I am incredibly glad I read it, and wouldn’t dissuade someone else from reading it, because I think the intellectual interest I got from it was a fully worthwhile experience. But on an emotional level, it did not do enough for me, and in a lot of places, that felt like a failing of craft – maybe too much plot speed at the expense of character development, too much ambition in scope at the expense of personal detail. That being said, I would likely read another novel by the author, not only in hope that beyond a debut those issues improved, but simply because it really, truly was interesting.
*One of them I think avoids this and occupies a much closer zone of moral greyness to the protagonist, so it’s not all bad. But only one.
A Reader of Else 