Customer Reviews

Reamde: A Novel

5 star:		(85)
4 star:		(61)
3 star:		(66)
2 star:		(44)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

The good news: *REAMDE* is a great page-turner, a bit of a throwback to Stephenson's early, pseudonymous techno-thriller *Interface*. I stayed up all night charging through the first half, and seriously considered skipping work so I could finish it. Having finished it, I have to say that it reads like a streak, which isn't something you can say about any of Stephenson's other novels. However, it's in his digressions and excesses that Stephenson is great, which brings us to...

The bad news: although it wouldn't be accurate to call this a "beach read", it's true that it isn't anywhere near as ambitious as Stephenson's earlier work, and there are no outrageous, indelible set-pieces like the Cap n' Crunch chapter of *Cryptonomicon* or the Newton-Leibniz smack down from *The Baroque Cycle*. And with the exception of the hilarious medievalist Don Squared, the characters aren't very memorable. In particular Zula, the heroine, is a bit bland and unconvincing.

The bottom line: if you're a Stephenson fan, you'll probably be a little disappointed, but if you're new to his writing, this is a perfect introduction to his style and outlook.

Just finished this beast of a novel. It's strange to give one of the best thrillers ever written a four-star review, but there it is...because this is, it needs to be said, not a towering accomplishment along the lines of a Baroque Trilogy or a Cryptonomicon or even a Diamond Age.

One could be forgiven for, like me, being a little disappointed about that. Neal Stephenson is an author capable of towering accomplishments. For an author as preoccupied as he is with grand, sweeping ideas of cosmological scale and intricacy, it's jarring to pick up his latest novel and find yourself reading a thriller that's not about ideas as much as it is about fun.

But oh, what a thriller. It's a thousand pages with the dynamic energy of a bullet train or a wild mustang, screaming along with an almost unbearable intensity and narrative zest. I found myself nipping a hundred pages at a time, like trying to gag down a glass of Bacardi 151, because it moves with explosive speed and a madcap intensity that never really lets up. It's not a traditional Stephenson novel, but only a writer of his caliber could have crafted a thriller this long, complex, and energetic. And you get the sense that he just had a ridiculous amount of fun writing it.

It's worth every moment of the read, and it's terrific fun watching the thriller genre get worked over by a writer of a caliber rarely seen in the straight-to-paperback set. But it's still not really as good as some of his earlier stuff...so it's a four, reluctantly. Doesn't mean it's still not one of the best books I'll read this year.

As an avid Stephenson fan, I feel let down after finishing Reamde. It is not as if it is a bad novel. In fact I would rate it as one of the better thrillers I have read in the last couple of years. If you like tales of very strong men and somewhat strong women in which lots of guns go off, then you will like Reamde. In its ambition and the quality of its execution it easily matches up to the works of the masters of this genre such as Clancy or Forsyth.

Yet, the book lacks the special Stephenson touch. First, there is no overarching theme tying the novel together. Cryptonomicon was about the elusive nature of information and wealth, the Baroque Cycle was about the rise of science and capitalism in the West. Having these deeper questions in the background made the surface action in the novels more meaningful. This time it is just a bunch of Good Guys chasing a bunch of Bad Guys.

Second, the characters in Reamde lack both depth and idiosyncrasy. Despite the length of the novel, there is so much going on that we do not get to know the nuances of the characters' personalities. I don't think I am the only Stephenson fan missing the Cap'n Crunch episodes. Though they start off with nominally different backgrounds and interests, as the novel progresses the good guys/girls all converge into a uniform mould of toughness, self-reliance and an aptitude for violence. The bad guys, apart form the chief villain, seem to exist just to be killed. These cookie-cutter "jihadists" seem to have been dropped in from some B-grade action movie script, for Stephenson does not seem to have any wish to examine either the ideology of religious fundamentalists or their social backgrounds. The cliched references to "virgins in heaven" are not what I had expected from an author who had earlier shown such a great awareness of history.

Finally, Stephenson depends too much on coincidences to tie the different plots threads together. This is particularly so in the way in which all the major characters are brought together to the same place for the final climax.

At times Stephenson's discussions of the difficulties in sustaining the game-world of T'rain seem to be ironical self-references to difficulties an author must face in sustaining an imaginary world that spans a thousand odd pages. But self-deprecation can go only so far. I would rather have the old Stephenson back. [Though to be fair, just having written one of the Baroque Cycle books is an achievement worthy of a lifetime.]

"Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age" were two of my favorite books of all time, and "Cryptonomicon" was worth the time it took to plow through it.

For about the first half of "Reamde" I felt like I was reading "Cryptonomicon" all over again. There is a familiar balance of international characters, intrigue, wit and technological digressions that make it a pleasure to read for any fan of Stephenson's previous novels.

The story starts going downhill when it turns into a terrorist hunt. The al-Qaeda characters are wooden, undeveloped, and evil for unexplained reasons. There was plenty of space to get inside their heads and Stephenson didn't even try. Strike one.

Strike two is the verbose gunfight that takes up the last quarter or so of the book. It's far too detailed and very difficult to follow. I found myself losing track of where characters were and what they were doing, and couldn't even maintain a consistent mental image of the scene without getting thrown off by random inconsistent environmental details that Stephenson kept throwing in.

Strike three is the Hollywood-esque setup of the ending. Stephenson used to always leave important issues unresolved at the end of his stories, which made for good food for thought. This story ties up cleanly in the end but Stephenson had to seriously finesse reality in order to get it there.

I got the overall impression that Stephenson wrote half of the book in his old mode, where he simply had fun coming up with characters and situations to get them into; then he spend the second half of the book trying to squeeze out a coherent ending that would get all the characters to where they needed to be, but losing a lot of the inherent quality of his style in the process.

First off: I love Neal Stephenson's novels. In the two decades since he hit his stride with Snow Crash, he's put out an unbelievable string of books that are big in almost every way: big, round characters with big ideas doing big things all over a big, round world in books that are doorstop big. He's the rare writer who can write a book that is both a thriller and a novel of ideas without disappointing in either department. I picked up Reamde expecting another tour de force and, for the first 50-100 pages, I felt like I was going get just that. But by page 3 or 400, I had reluctantly come to the conclusion that it just wasn't going to happen this time, that this isn't so much a Thriller of Ideas as it is a thriller. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's an intelligent person's thriller, with classic Stephenson touches like glamorous nerds, vivid Asian locations, innovative perspectives on society and technology, and liberal use of the word ramify (search any N.S. book and you will find things ramifying, I promise). There are even Shaftoes and Waterhouses, though here they're all called Forthrasts.

But the big ideas that seem to be coalescing in the opening chapters never quite materialize. The conceptual model behind T'rain is really cool, but I've been spoiled to the point where I fully expect to get at least one more equally ambitious concept every hundred or so pages and then have them all tie together at the end in some mind-blowing way. Instead, he sets a lot characters on collision courses with a couple of big coincidences, then spends the rest of the book just following the all the various pieces until they stop moving, typically because they've been shot. Still, it's an entertaining read. Coming from most other authors I'd probably be pleasantly surprised. The only reason I feel disappointed is because my expectations from Stephenson are so high. If Amazon's stars would take fractions, I'd give it 3.5/5

P.S., I was browsing the listings on his author page, and The Cobweb is rated just as high as Cryptonomicon. What's that about?

P.P.S. If you're going to charge me $17 for a book with zero manufacturing costs, please proof read it first. Newspapers have fewer typos and they are produced in a single day. Better yet, give me an advance copy and $1000, and I'll proof it for you. Hell, make it $10,000. At $17 a pop, you can clearly afford it.

****The above note about the typos was based on the original kindle edition. An update has since been released and I'm sure it addresses many of the quality control issues I was griping about. Even in the original edition, I wasn't bothered too much by the errors, per se, more by their existence in a book with such a premium price tag. They never obscured NS's intent and were really only an occasional and minor distraction.

Like another reviewer below, I have abandoned Reamde after about 450 pages. It just wasn't worth my time finishing it - uninteresting, unbelievable characters doing unlikely things in an uninteresting way.

I had been looking forward to reading this book enormously, and had anxiously awaited it after pre-ordering it. After Cryptonomicon and the inventive and interesting Anathem, I was curious to see what Stephenson would do with a novel based on the world of massively multiplayer online gaming. What resulted was disappointing. The novel starts well, there is much interesting exposition about the world of MMPOGs, but then the novel transforms into a run-of-the-mill action story involving the Russian mafia, British spies and, predictably, Muslim terrorists. Given that MMPOGs are largely unexplored territory in fiction, and that Stephenson is almost uniquely placed to take advantage of this opportunity, Reamde represents an enormous wasted opportunity.

While characterisation has never been Stephenson's strongest skill, in Reamde his characters are positively embarrassing. The dialogue of the Russian Mafioso is one cliché after another. Characters form instant emotional attachments for other characters in a matter of moments and for no obvious reason. All of the characters are predictable and shallow. All of the non-American characters think and talk like Americans with accents. Events are driven by coincidences so absurd that it is difficult to take them remotely seriously.

And the novel is long - way too long. There is a major problem in modern publishing, which is driven more by the need to move product than the desire to produce a good book. It is interesting to read about the collaboration between Joseph Heller and is editors in the writing of Catch-22. The editorial process for that book was highly interventionist and its editors could justifiably lay claim to being co-authors. These days, however, we get the feeling that star writers such as Stephenson are able to publish without any editorial interference, with the result that we get massively bloated books that fail to deliver on their intrinsic promise. Reamde is one such book: there is a great deal of unnecessary detail and description, and this slows down the pacing of what might otherwise be an entertaining read. Instead of moving the story forward, the reader's eyes glaze over.

Mine certainly glazed over as I read page after page of unnecessary detail and description, interspersed with characters just doing stuff. I didn't know why they were doing it, I didn't know where it was going, and I was getting nothing interesting or entertaining out of this story. So, sadly, it was time to delete it from my Kindle and move on to something else.

I see that many other people have enjoyed this novel (although the reviews so far are decidedly mixed) so I wouldn't necessarily let this review deter you from reading Reamde. However, if your preference runs to character-driven fiction or fiction which deals with interesting ideas, you might find, as I did, that this book does not reward the investment of your time.

This was a disappointing book. Stephenson has developed a reputation for books that mix big ideas with sometimes manic action, with the ideas having very prominent roles. In this book ideas decidedly take a back-seat to the action.

The first 150 pages of the book are typical (and good!) Stephenson. There are some interesting characters and concepts, and the idea of basing a large conflict around aesthetics (this earth-tones vs. the brights) is genuinely intriguing and would have been an interesting theme to explore throughout the book. The characters are decently drawn (Stephenson nailed the Russian characters particularly well), and the book moves along at a decent pace.

And then, by pure coincidence, we stumble upon a heavily armed group of Muslim terrorists, and spend the next 850 pages in a typical Clancy/Baldacci/Patterson-esque thriller. There are two large and extended action sequences that take up about 500-600 of those pages; these are well written and encourage continued page-turning, but they are simply too long. The ideas introduced in the first 150 pages of the book are abandoned almost entirely, and we're left instead with a standard thriller-genre work that is content to describe actions exclusively. The 'Stephensonian approach' that tackles big ideas and themes alongside the action is nowhere to be found.

On the whole, the book is disappointing. It lacks what Stephenson usually brings to his books, and replaces it with extended action scenes that are both gripping due to their pace and tedious due to their length. It is a well written book (with the exception of a typo or grammatical mistake every 50 pages or so that should have been caught by editors), but it isn't at all what I was expecting, and I can't imagine it was what most other people familiar with Stephenson's work were expecting either.

Well, Reamde certainly is one thing: A perfect thriller. It has internet-billionaires, hackers, former soviet elite soldiers, middle-eastern terrorists, British spies and many more. It also has a well written plot, that only on rare occasions needs a bit of help from a "deus ex machina" (or in that case rather: "natura").
In other words: A real page turner.

Unfortunately the book lacks a bit of the sophistication I was used to expect from Neal Stephenson. The second half of the book consists of a relatively linear "kill the bad guys"-plot. Even the hacker characters can find almost no use of their superior skills and intelligence, apart from firing a semiautomatic from time to time.

All in all I enjoyed reading this book, but was a bit disappointed, as it lacks some of the unique features of Stephenson's novels I came to like in his former works.

I got the book on pre-order, but only got around to reading it now. Took a few days, at its whopping volume.

I first have to say that I was pretty thrilled throughout the book. That is, I experienced the sensation of thrill - every section is a cliffhanger, and I would definitely consider this an addictive page-turner. The changes in character perspective are well timed and add to the suspense. But that's the only praise I can give.

I've read almost every other Stephenson book - and every one has offered a ton of original ideas and new perspectives - even outside the realm of science fiction (consider the Baroque Cycle). But this story has nothing to offer but an extended shootout with terrorists, a genre amply saturated by shows like 24 and writers like Tom Clancy. The only nod to technology or engineering is in the presence of an MMORPG in the periphery of the plot - but it presents a distraction rather than any insight or cleverness.

Stephenson tops this off with several extended action scenes (which seem like they were written with a movie deal in mind) that can last over a hundred pages. Not to mention tacky romantic parings for all the eligible single characters.

As a long-time Stephenson fan, I'm very disappointed. The opening was great, interesting ideas in the vein of what you'd expect from a Stephenson book about events taking place right now. After that, however, the book comes to a halt for the middle 80% where the promise of the opening is lost to the over-long setups full of extraordinary coincidences, a bunch of "Action" sequences that weren't all that exciting or relevant, and a whole bunch of stuff I ended up speed-reading just to not have to abandon it all together.