Customer Reviews

Half the Day Is Night

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Half the Day Is Night" is not a sequel to her first novel, "China Mountain Zhang," but it seems to take place in the same fully realized future world of the latter work. It is also written in the same matter-of-fact style, with the same day-in-the-life sort of plot, and the same depth of character. This is not a novel for someone interested in typical SF fare--space adventure, science detectives, epic trilogies, and the like. Although the future imagined here has clearly been carefully constructed, at no point does the narrator intrude upon the characters and the events that unfold to explain things. The effect is one of complete immersion in a different reality, but one that (in retrospect) can easily be extrapolated from our own. That, to me, is one definition of great science fiction. This, to me, is a great science fiction novel. Maureen McHugh is the sort of author who deserves a much wider audience; at the same time, she is the sort of author one knows will never command that audience, by the simple criterion that she writes fiction, not novelizations. I can't recommend this book more highly.

After China Mountain Zhang, I wondered whether McHugh could write anything quite as good. But she has. Again, in terms of physical action, nothing much happens, indeed this book is much more enclosed and claustrophobic than Zhang, not least because of its setting in an undersea city. But the real enclosure is not physical but economic and political; most people are unable to leave because they are too poor or somehow unable to obtain the necessary permits. Like CMZ this is a story about the people left behind in sci-fi's glorious visions of the future, and even though David Dai is in some ways much more of a traditional action hero than Zhang (he's a mercenary and bodyguard), his profession is not glamorous, and the heroic potential is further subverted by necessity which forces him into dangerous and tedious construction work. The politics of Half the Day is Night are more overt than CMZ, more immediately about the vast masses of poor and marginalised in our own world, but, hey, what's wrong with that? There are too few politically engaged fiction writers. Another very thoughtful and satisfying book.

McHugh started strong with China Mountain Zhang, and then..the ship hit the rocks and sank in the ocean off Haiti. Here the atmosphere is claustrophobic, since everyone lives in some undersea..something (since no one has a job, except security people, why are they there - oops, stage dressing). Mayla, a bank executive, is a prisoner of, well miles of seawater, and her own ditzyness, and an existence that is pointless and inexplicable, even to her (and she is rich). McHugh lards this effort with howlers to beat the band - an undersea city with a freeway where internal combustion cars drive to and fro - ever hear of electricity? Poor people in the hermetically sealed undersea existence grind in poverty, burning charcoal (from where?? undersea kelp forests??). And no one ever heard of birth control pills? and so so forth and so on. My favorite point was when the former mercenary enters the rich lady's house and looks out a vast window at---blackness and nothing, and wonders, "who would want a window on nothing?" Who would want to buy a book about it either?

McHugh has a great knack for taking ordinary people in ordinary places, putting them in not extraordinarily stressful situations, and producing out of all that a really well-told, well-paced story with characters you care about. She did this very,very well in her first novel, _China Mountain Zhang,_ and she does it almost as well in this one, her second. She also doesn't make the mistake of stopping to explain when and where the story is set, explaining how history has created this particular future: She just does her narrative job and lets the reader figure it out, bit by bit. In this case, we're a couple of generations into the future, when an undersea colony built by the United States in the Caribbean has won its independence. But that was sixty years ago, and now Caribe is just another Third World Latin American dictatorship run by a president-for-life, with an upper class who are very rich and an underclass who are very poor. Jean-David Dai, a young French ex-soldier wounded in the South African wars, has come to try out for a security job looking after a bank officer named Mayla Ling, a naive member of the "haves" who has been targeted by a political underground. David's trying to escape his past and his nightmares, and he's not sure this job is the way to do it, but he agrees to give it a shot for six months. Then things get out of hand, naturally. Mayla's house is bombed, David disappears, the bank is sucked up by a neighboring conglomerate, and things become very uncomfortable. The setting is fascinating; think Colombia or Guatemala, but 250 meters under the seabed, with a police force that does things its own way and citizens who know better than to argue, where business is routinely done with bribes and kickbacks, where internal combustion buses operate in defiance of good sense -- this being a closed system where air has to be recycled and the lower levels of society never get enough oxygen. Mayla has never known anything different, and comparing her comfortable view of this world to David's reaction to the cold and the dark makes you really pay attention. A quiet, thoughtful, convincing novel.

This was my 1st experience with McHugh's writing. It left me with a big smile on my face & wanting more.
The setting in the near future underwater state of Caribe is not crucial to the plot. The same story could have been placed anywhere from the 1960s to a future where interstellar travel is common. So don't expect any new ideas about future technology, sociology, etc.
I have almost no direct experience with dysfunctional 3rd world countries. That said, Caribe is right on the mark from what I have heard & read from people who do. The 2 protagonists are well depicted & their responses to events are entirely believeable. It was easy for me to imagine myself feeling & doing the same things in the same situation.

When French/Asian war veteran David Dai accepts a job as a security guard to a female banker in the Caribbean, he's expecting to be able to get away from the violence and trauma of fighting in Africa. However, the underwater domes of the cities of Caribe and Marincite are hardly the tropical paradise he was unconsciously expecting. Rather, they are torn by poverty and social unrest, and plagued by corrupt and incompetent authorities. The resentful former holder of his job is still at his employer's home, and to top it all off, his employer, Mayla Ling, seems to have mysteriously become a target of a terrorist group. David wants nothing more than to quit the job and go home - but underwater cities aren't always so easy to get out of, and every incident seems to get him more deeply embroiled in the local situation - and Mayla's life.
While containing a good deal of social criticism/commentary and 'humanist' insight, the story is primarily a tense, action-filled thriller. With the elements of shady business deals and takeovers, illegal drugs and colorful, dangerous underworlds, rich CEOs and shady crooks, virtual reality gaming and illicit neural stimulators, it had a very 'cyberpunk' feel - I'd highly recommend it for fans of William Gibson.

Read it in one day.... not that it's short, I just couldn't put it down!

I was really depressed when I finished this book, thinking that I'd now read all of McHugh's published work - but then I found out that she actually just had a new short-story collection released in July! Yay! (It's small press, though, so it might be a little hard to find - but it's now on my wishlist!)

The book starts well but after 170 pages I completely lost interest. The underwater scenario is very promising but the whole atomoshpere is destroyed by boring politics and all too sudden events. After a while I stopped caring for the main characters because their aimless wandering (very realistic, no doubt) was simply boring. I don't want to give any spoiler, anyone who still considers reading this book will soon know what I mean.

This is not a real SF book and it doesn't come close to the great "China Mountain Zhang" or the moving "Nekropolis". Considering the hazzle to get this book in Germany it was a big disappointment.

Seinfeld's show was about "nothing". So was this book. The characters wandered aimlessly, and they weren't interesting to start with. The undersea world was well-realized, though. It's a good thing I got this from the library, or I'd have been very unhappy with it. I hope her next book is better.

Apparently Maureen McHugh knows dozens for she manages to keep the reader on the edge of their seat. Not through anticipation of events but because they have fallen asleep and can't help but try to escape. It's the future and there are underwater cities and there are problems and crises. At least there are in the boring lives of the boring characters. Sorry, this is one for insomniacs.