Necroville reviewed by Lawrence Person

Review of Necroville by Lawrence Person. Originally published in SF Eye #14, Spring 1996, page 108. Reprinted with permission.

NECROVILLE (U.K.)/TERMINAL CAFE (U.S.) by Ian McDonald.
Gollancz SF/Bantam Spectra
317 pp/(U.S. ?), 1993 U.K./1994 U.S., £15.99/$12.95
ISBN: 0 575 05493 X (hb)/0-553-37416-8

Reading Ian McDonald's Necroville (Terminal Café here in the states), brought on the most profoundly dichotomous reaction I've ever had to a novel. I spent half my reading time thinking "My God! This may be the most brilliant science fiction novel ever written!" Unfortunately, I spent the other half thinking "If this is so brilliant, why is it so dull?"

At its best, Necroville exhibits more of what Bruce Sterling calls "the inherent virtues of science fiction" than any other modern novel. Its extrapolative elements are both logical and wildly imaginative, its prose wrought with exquisite, poetic precision, its imagery stunningly rendered, and technological and philosophical implications masterfully explored. Yet despite these virtues, Necroville is still very difficult reading.

In a post-cyberpunk future, nanotechnology allows resurrection of the dead, allowing them to be exploited as indentured labor by the corporations sponsoring their revival. Necroville follows a single day in the lives of five friends who traditionally rendezvous at the Terminal Cafe in the teaming St. John Necroville on the Day of the Dead. While all this is happening below, slamships of the Freedead, resurrectees who rebelled after waking to an afterlife of corporate servitude in deep space, are arriving at Earth to free their fellow dead.

McDonald's skill at creating a richly textured and nuanced future surpasses even that of William Gibson. His narrative frame swarms with fascinating details, each following from his assumptions with extrapolative rigor and baroque elan. Necroville is among a rare handful of the very best modern science fiction novels when it comes to depicting the myriad changes, both vast and subtle, wrought at every level of society by the rapid pace of technological change: Gibson's Neuromancer, Sterling's Schismatrix, Pat Cadigan's Synners, Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden, and parts of Greg Bear's Moving Mars.

Most impressive of all is "Qubec's story," an awesome glimpse of the Freedead's self-evolving deep space "clades" that marks Necroville as Schismatrix's bastard child. It's post-humanist vision of an immortal, infinitely mutable, nano-ressurected humanity colonizing the stars displays more original ideas and a greater sense of wonder in twelve pages than many of science fiction's most popular writers have achieved during their entire careers.

Why then, in the midst of this transcendently moveable feast, did I sometimes find it a real struggle to turn the next page? It's still something of a mystery, but I think I can pinpoint the major causes. Part of the problem is due to his characters, and part to his plot, but ultimately it may be that the novel McDonald has constructed is so richly baroque that even the most sophisticated reader may get lost in the labyrinth wonders of its prose.

On the surface, McDonald seems to have done all the characterization right. His viewpoint characters are all distinct personalities, well differentiated and each with their own quirks. Yet none are particularly memorable, not even YoYo Mok, the dyslexic female ex-boat person lawyer who's search for a Maguffin takes her through the novel's most cyberpunk-infused scenery. Part of the problem is due to McDonald splitting narrative attention between the five of them, and part to their being overwhelmed by the fascinating nature of the world they inhabit. But his most annoying technique, and the one that probably slows the novel more than anything else, is the tendency of several secondary characters to speak long, exquisitely written paragraphs expounding in great detail on The Significance of It All.

McDonald's narrative strategy in cramming all the novel's events into the course of a single day is also to blame. While allowing him to display several aspects of his world, only two of the five story lines contribute directly to the overarching plot of the Freedead's arrival. As a result, what little suspense he builds up tends to dissipate in the meanderings of the multiple story lines. It's almost as though a virtuoso pianist were playing a particularly difficult piece with such transcendent art that he was adding improvisational flourishes to each and every stanza-so many that the original melodic line is all but lost.

Ultimately, I can't escape the sinking feeling that I've been trapped in the old adage "be careful of what you wish for, because you just might get it." I've always wanted to read a no-compromise SF novel that pushes social and technological extrapolation as far as it can go. However, now that I've found one, I feel like I've been force-feed several pounds of white chocolate: it was definitely delicious, but so rich that by the end it was a real struggle to swallow it all.

Though probably too rich and strange for the average science fiction fan, any SF Eye reader should rush out and pick it up. It may push the genre's envelope so hard it breaks, but lapses engendered by an excess of ambition are always forgivable.

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