This week's novel is Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel. It was recommended to me about a million times by a friend of mine, who read a lot more into it than I did. Do not believe Nick's lies! This is not a story about how world religion and politics changed when faced with proof of aliens! I don't know where he got that.
Eleven-year-old Rose falls into a glowing hole in the woods by her house, landing in the palm of a giant robotic hand, that is made of material that makes no sense, and is far older than makes any sense. As an adult and an accomplished physicist, Rose takes over the project to locate the rest of the pieces of the robot, solve the mystery of where it came from (aliens) and how it works, and hopefully use it to benefit mankind rather than start the next world war.
The story is told through a series of transcribed interviews with the major players in the project: Rose (whose last name is Franklin, and I don't know how I feel about that), the pilots, the linguist, and some others. It's difficult to maintain tension and momentum in epistolatory stories. We hear about the action after it's happened and we only get pieces of the story. But here it works exceptionally well. All the interviewees are excited about their findings, and their excitement is infectious, even when they're giving info dumps about what the robot is made of and why that's weird. The interviewees have big and distinct personalities that come through in the interviews, making the reader care about them and their struggles. The interviewer also tends to catch them right after important events, when their emotions are still high and their recollections are believably vivid.
The nameless interviewer acts as a non-entity, just there to record, and stays that way through a handful of interviews. But then the interviewees get used to him. They anticipate and comment on aspects of his personality, and his character starts to grow for the reader. Eventually, we're given glimpses into his back story and we start to understand how many strings he's pulling in the background, how many steps ahead he's working. He becomes the main character.
As for the second part of what makes epistolatory stories awkward--that we only get snip-its of the full story--Sleeping Giants works around that by taking on qualities of a con or a heist, where the full plan doesn't come out until the end, and in that light it works well.
There is some really bananas science (there's a part about legs that made me laugh out loud at an inappropriate moment because it's SO SILLY) and some super questionable decision making (yeah! Keep the giant murder robot under a major airport! I'm sure nothing will go wrong!) It's kind of groan worthy.
But despite its silly story, it's told well.
***
Next week: Six of Crows, YA fantasy heist by Leigh Bardugo.
No comments:
Post a Comment