Slow River [Hardcover]

Nicola Griffith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 4, 1995

Nicola Griffith, winner of the Tiptree Award and the Lambda Award for her widely acclaimed first novel Ammonite, now turns her attention closer to the present in Slow River, the dark and intensely involving story of a young woman's struggle for survival and independence on the gritty underside of a near-future Europe.
She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore Van de Oest was the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families...and now she was nobody.
Then out of the rain walked Spanner, an expert data pirate who took her in, cared for her wounds, and gave her the freedom to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore if she didn't want to be found: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped...but she paid for her newfound freedom in crime, deception, and degradation--over and over again.
Lore had a choice: She could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner...and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and inventing her future.
But to start again, Lore required Spanner's talents--Spanner, who needed her and hated her, and who always had a price. And even as Lore agreed to play Spanner's games one final time, she found that there was still the price of being a Van de Oest to be paid. Only by confronting her past, her family, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be....
In Slow River, Nicola Griffith skillfully takes us deep into the mind and heart of her complex protagonist, where the past must be reconciled with the present if the future is ever to offer solid ground. Slow River poses a question we all hope never to need to answer: Who are you when you have nothing left?

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The dark and intensely involving story of a young woman's struggle for survival and independence on the gritty underside of a near-future Europe, by the author of Ammonite, which won the Tiptree and Lambda Awards.

From Publishers Weekly

Griffith's compelling follow-up to Ammonite is an intricate, cautionary tale of love, betrayal and self-discovery in near-future Europe. Heiress Lore Van Oesterling escapes kidnappers who plan to kill her after her family refuses to pay her ransom. Lying bloody and naked in the street, she's taken in by a reclusive female hacker named Spanner, with whom she forms an uneasy alliance to scam the rich and naive. Lore finds herself falling in love and becoming more dependent on Spanner, but "whenever Lore reached for her, she wavered and was gone, like the shimmering reflection on the oily surface of the river." At loose ends and tormented by the growing venality of their "victimless crimes," Lore faces her culpability and decides to get on with her life: "We all get hurt. But self-pity, lack of courage, leads to a sort of... mortification of the soul. Corruption. And then it takes more courage, costs more pain, to clean it up afterward." She assumes the identity of a dead woman, rents a flat and starts an honest job at a waste water-treatment plant, struggling to establish an identity independent of her family's name and wealth. Griffith's only misstep is to chronicle Lore's life through both first- and third-person narration; while the technique is refreshing at first, confusion mounts as the narrative modes converge. Otherwise, this exceptionally well-written novel could win yet more awards for its talented author. 25,000 first printing.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 343 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey; 1st edition (July 4, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345391659
• ISBN-13: 978-0345391650
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,269,999 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Uneven but Entertaining, July 29, 2004

By 

Daniel H. Bigelow (Cathlamet, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Slow River (Paperback)

The action in this science fiction novel alternates between three different phases in the life of the protagonist, Lore van de Oest. One phase, told in the third person and present tense, consists of biographical sketches of Lore's privileged upbringing until a kidnapping gone wrong propels her, naked and injured, into a new life on the streets. The second, told in the third person and past tense, tells how she survives for three years on the mean streets with the help of an amoral hustler called Spanner, whom she joins in a life of crime. The third, in which Lore speaks in the first person, is about how Lore, now separated from Spanner, tries to go straight and build a life for herself as a shift worker in a high-tech water purification plant.

Author Nicola Griffith leavens each section with vivid futuristic detail, and she is an evocative writer with a sharp eye for character. As a writer, her choice to switch between first and third person, past and present tense -- her biggest gamble -- is also her greatest failure, as the transition can sometimes be jarring. Other than that, her prose flows as smoothly and deeply as the river of the title.

Two of the three parts of Slow River -- the ones about street life and privileged life in the near future -- are above average examples of basic science fiction themes, most worth reading for Griffith's prose. The third, about Lore's employment at the extremely well-imagined purification facility, is more original. The atmosphere of low-grade tension inherent in the possibility that some malfunction there will cause an ecological catastrophe gives an element of suspense to Griffith's novel that keeps the reader turning pages.

Or, at least, it did me. It says something, about either Griffith or me, that I read as fast as I could through chapters about surefire topics like high-tech crime and futuristic luxury because I was desperate to find out what happens to the poorly-paid denizens of a water treatment plant. It takes talent to make this sort of topic so absorbing, but Griffith has no shortage of that -- and her peers agree, and awarded Slow River various awards, including the prestigious Nebula.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Top notch SF, January 25, 2005

By 

Cavan Terrill (Ottawa, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Slow River (Paperback)

I was surprised at some of the poor reviews given this book and have an idea that these stem from those picking up books from a list of Nebula Award winners. This book is not at all your typical SF story, indeed it feels much more like a mainstream story with some SF aspects than it does an SF story. I'm an avid reader of both science fiction as well as mainstream fiction, so this holds a good deal of appeal for me.

Griffith's prose is wonderful and showcases a beauty of language seldom seen in science fiction. Her characterization is also near perfect. I won't spend time discussing the plot as that's been handled amply by the other reviewers, but I will echo one other person's thoughts: The storyline that has Lore working at a sewage plant is, surprisingly, every bit as engrossing as the ones that deal with her kidnapping and her high society upbringing. To me, that says a good deal about Griffith's talent as a writer.

As for the sex scenes, which some people describe as being nearly constant in the book, there are actually about four or five scenes taking up somewhere around ten pages of the book (not each, but in total). Additionally, they're not placed in the story without purpose.

Overall, an excellent book. Personally, I'm quite glad that it won a Nebula. It's certainly desereving.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of those stories that stays with you., December 29, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Slow River (Paperback)

"Slow River" is one of those books that I read again and again, wearing my copy to a dog-eared mess, giving other copies to friends, keeping in an easily accessible place so I can re-read a favorite passage or look up a memorable phrase.

This book captivated me on so many levels that I'm hard put to say what I like best about it. Griffith's prose, like the "slow river" she describes in the opening chapter, is smooth and languid on the surface, but has hidden depths that slowly rise as the story continues. The structure of the story is excellent; the use of different tenses and points of view (Lore is always the viewpoint character, but sometimes first-person, sometimes third-person) is smooth and never confusing. Griffith's plot construction is first rate, allowing the characters to breathe and grow.

The story itself is equally tantilizing. The glimpses we get of Lore's family are few, but telling; one senses that she is used to living a life of precision masked by glamour. When she loses these things, she loses her identity.

Griffith's use of symbolism is frequent but never heavy-handed or overstated; it would be easy for the PIDA (a type of personal ID), for example, to become just another tired cliche. The symbols merely serve to underline important things about the characters, who come to the forefront, each an individual.

In fact, it's hard for me to cite anything bad about this book. I suppose I could think of something if I tried, but Griffith has that rare knack of enveloping the reader in her story so completely that every time I read it, I forget about analyzing it and just sit back and enjoy the book.