Like many who have reacted to this novel, the first chapter knocked me out. I had already read two disparate critiques in newspapers of the book that led me to seek the book out, so I knew that after the opening the initial thrill might not sustain itself. This hesitation was, after I read the novel straight through in two sittings, shown to be true. The long polar trek of Laura does borrow from the well-titled "The Worst Journey in the World," but I found these sections, after a while, rather pat and uninvolving most of the time. It's difficult to stay interested in Laura's predicament after a while, with nobody else for her to talk to or to keep us alert. She has not led that exciting a life for her to have a lot of recollections to fall back upon that make her any more than ordinary. And, in a novel, we don't want to be stuck with the mundane girl-next-door as a protagonist, even if she is in dire straits in a terrible place. The scene-setting of the first cabin and her growing peril sets up this phase of the narrative promisingly, but once she's out on the ice the plot holds no surprises. Like her, we get drowsy in this lonely stretch of the novel.
As for the city-in-limbo, it was puzzling if, as seemed to be confirmed in the Coke executive's reverie, the city increasingly was "populated" not only by the people Laura was thinking of, but that Laura "generated" everything else in the city rather than what the inhabitants themselves did in the city. It seems that the people in the city limited what could and could not be done in the city, as their occupations seem to constrain what the city contained--not only the people, but objects. There are no salting trucks to melt the snow because Laura knew no salting truck driver: all of this background needed more clarification. Also, the reciprocation of thinking by those in the city as felt by Laura was too glossed over and marginal in the narrative that indirectly occured from her p-o-v.
Many of those found in the city proved remarkably dull: Minny, for example, considering the time spent on her by the author. The walking preacher character was necessary to show a religious fanatic's reaction to the city, but again, he failed to keep my interest. The whole place seemed more like a Edward Hopper painting of sorry urbanites rather than a place where food was cooked, papers were sold, and business seemed to go on much as before. There's a noirish air to the whole place, but it seemed less appealing than its inhabitants seemed to consider their residence. I guess there's no alternative! However, as the Antarctic marbles signal a climactic phase of the story, Brockmeier recovered his initial control of the novel and it came to a satisfactory and well-written closing.
Like so much SF and speculative literature, this would have worked better as a novella of 100 pages. At 250 pp., there's too much padding, and most of the supporting characters do not motivate the reader to want to pause and ponder their predicament. With these sorts of apocalyptic fables, it often remains a challenge for writers to keep the characterization gripping as the amount of people diminish in the bleak setting, but I still would recommend this book for, as with so much SF again, the fantastic world-view that it shares and elaborates.
