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January 21, 2004
Idlewild revisited
Noticed this morning that someone came across my site as the result of a search for Sagan's Idlewild, and frankly, I felt a little guilty for not having been a little more explicit in my reaction to it. Of course, it could have been Sagan himself, or a publisher's rep, looking for responses to the book.
When I travelled over to Amazon to see how many reviews were posted there, I learned just why I've stopped going to Amazon for book reviews. The more important they've gotten (the top reviewers there are profiled regularly in trade publications and, I assume, are getting serious swag from publishers), the more commercialized, performative, and downright inaccurate they've become. The lead review for Idlewild comes from some guy who's a "Top 1000" reviewer, and starts out:
Nick Sagan's Idlewild is best described as a cross between Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk and Neil Gaiman. This futuristic tale is all about the power of mankind over its own fate and the way in which the human race is a self-destructive one. Sagan takes us into a bleak and uncertain future that has more questions than it has answers, that has more darkness than it has light.
Forgive my snot here, but this review is best described as a cross between clichés and--oh wait, it's not a cross at all, just clichés. None of this is accurate, but it makes for entertainingly vacuous cover blurb material, I suppose. Sagan's book lacks the provocation of Ellis or Palahniuk, and has nowhere near the imagination of Gaiman. It's caught between the obvious screen-oriented writing experience of Sagan, and a plot that demands more interiority on the part of the narrator than we get. The amnesiac waking up to find himself the potential target of a conspiracy is a convention, and post-Matrix, the "twist" is a lot less compelling than most of the Amazon reviews seem to imagine.
Those things being said, it's a decent book, and I hope that Sagan keep writing, and more importantly, working at his writing. The prose was pretty solid, but in this book, the premise is forced to carry almost the entire book, esp when you consider that it's basically the answer to the mystery that we're solving alongside the main character. Frankly, it's hard for me to see much of a sequel, although that's apparently what we've been promised.
In short, there's potential here, but there's also the possbility of real mediocrity, and if Sagan or his editor travels to Amazon to find out how the book's being "received," that's the road more likely taken.
Posted by cgbrooke at January 21, 2004 09:35 AM