We read this book for my speculative fiction book club and it was an interesting trip, not as thoroughly enjoyed by some members of the club as other books, but interesting nonetheless. The novel tells two stories, one of Lady Neku, a thirteen year old girl from the far future (maybe) who has gotten embroiled in a number of troublesome events in our near future, and the other of Kit Nouveau, a British Iraq War vet whose bar is blown up, and with it his wife. Then his ex-girlfriend's gangster mom turns up and things get dicey.Some thoughts: * I found the book hard to get into, but pretty interesting after the first half. The pacing of the mystery picked up once the characters and their relationships to one another were established. Grimwood has a roundabout way of writing that takes some getting used to, but his choices about when to reveal certain key details about Kit's past work well. * Neku dances along at the edge of sanity, one moment seeming to be everything the narrative makes her out to be--a teenage refuge from a far-future dynastic war--and the next she's a scared teenager flirting with a college boy. We had an interesting discussion about whether her dual story was real or not--I believe there are a couple bits in the book that prove it to be real, but they're pretty shallow and could be read as psychological. I suggested that the similar structures of the events in her far-future memory segments and the current life events work the same either way. * I also couldn't help but notice the similar plot structures to the much less well-written or interesting novel The Identity Plunderers that I read a couple weeks ago. Both books involve two stories, one from the current world, one from the far future. Both involve alterable memories and people trying to recover those memories. Both are not immediately obvious about who's trying to do what or who the key players are. Both have titles that are only tangentially related to the novels they name. * The novel works very much like a classic hard-boiled detective novel, something like The Big Sleep. Kit gets thrust into a series of mysteries whose players and forces overlap in strange ways. There are big forces and plenty of beatings and warnings to stay out of it that don't get followed. The resolution of the mystery also doesn't come off as a big moment of revelation they way it usually does in classical detective stories. Instead it slowly seeps into the narrative, and the story of how the detective reveals the solution and gets away without being murdered holds much more interest for us. Also, he has little hope of winning out over the corrupt forces that rule the world. You can almost hear the character at the end of the novel saying, "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown." * The science-fiction elements of the book are actually pretty weak and I'm not sure they're necessary. While they're well-written and interesting, I'm not sure what would have been lost if Neku had actually been a contemporary girl with similar problems. We also pondered whether placing a book in the near future (10 years or so) without significant technological or cultural change (video phones seem to be the main new thing) makes it science-fiction or not.Overall, a well-written book, but I'm not sure if I liked it enough to read any more of Grimwood's novels. I'll see if I find myself haunted by this book in the coming weeks or months.
The common sentiment in about a third of reviews is as follows: End of the World Blues is a cool noir novel and a smart sci-fi novella that Jon Grimwood decided to intercut together for reasons that escape readers.Most people who found it dichotomous came for the noir, but wondered why the sci-fi chapters were there. As a sci-fi fan, I seem to be on the other side: Neku's "Floating Rope World" is a brilliant Earth that outlived its time, and I wanted to spend so much more story in it. Unfortunately, what I suppose is a reasonably good Noir (which is set in a near future that seems just like the present except for the phones) kept getting in the way.It would be different if the two stories had some intrinsic connection, but they don't. It just reads like Neku (who never actually claims to be a time-traveller) stole a lot of money from the mob in the present under another name. How did a teenage girl steal millions from the mob? *That* would be an interesting backstory, but instead she is either a time traveller or is psychotic. Now that's fine, but her backstory has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the plot. If we could just rip this book up into two piles and repackage one as noir and the other as sci-fi, I think many people would be a lot happier.The characters are good. The setting is evocative. Kit is an interesting half-wash-out who knows he's a wash out, but still very much alive and ambitious. He is The Ex-Pat on several levels. Neku in her own world is a great spoiled child of demons who is trying to be better than the messed up politics in her life. In the present she's an alternate Lizbeth Salander in an alternate-universe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with the "conspiracy/exploitation/mental-illness" knob turned up. On that note, I am curious why there is this common trope of "This middle aged partially broken-down but ultimately honest dude travels around solving a murder mystery with a quirky, disturbed goth girl with curious but unexamined sexual undertones." Midlife crisis? (This trope also has some relation to The Windup Bird Chronicles, another novel to which EOTWB is frequently compared.)The audiobook version is quite well-done, BTW.If anyone can recommend more stories like the messed up feudal *far future* in this book, please do drop me a line. I would love to read them.
Do You like book End Of The World Blues (2007)?
The dual story line had me wondering what the hell was going on most of the time, but in no way detracted from my enjoyment of this book.The main characters, Kit and Neku are both as complicated and fascinating as you are likely to find in fiction.The plot lines are complex and otherworldly as we follow Kit through the organized crime syndicates of two countries, and Neku through some future(?) parallel crime-family like construct.All I can say is that the novel commanded my full attention, and kept me enraptured til the end.There is some beautiful writing going on here, also.
—Chris Ellis
While not bothered by the frequently unclear aspects of the narrative (some, but not all, of which are at least tidied up at the end,) the disjointed nature of the novel does provide for much re-reading of earlier pages, especially as the main storyline arcs so far away from the original plot that when it returns to that aspect, none of the important players are fresh in the mind. That or I just needed to have read it faster so that the earlier introduced characters were still memorable when we stumble into them again later.Overall, a good read, not quite sci-fi, but more of a futurish tale with a fantasy narrative side-story, the title is deceptive. If you're looking for yet another way the world might blow up, this isn't it.
—Allison
One of the most difficult SF books to write is one partly set in the present, and partly in the (near or far) future. Here we have a gritty and hyper realistic Japan and London, and a post-meltdown future so far ahead it seems like a fantasy.Balancing these two world views is tricky, because how do you make both seem equally real? And there is a danger that slipping into your imagined future can be more of a digression than a plot progression.So it is a difficult balance to achieve, but it is obviously a challenge that JCG relishes, because this is a note perfect novel that reads like a grittier, more humane William Gibson, with splashes of Iain M. Banks (rope worlds and sentient castles) and M. John Harrison (a talking cat...) thrown in to leaven the mixture.JCG is not one to drip-feed the reader either; there is just the right note of ambiguity here, and a whodunnit plot sufficiently complex to keep you guessing right until the end.And there are some grace notes in this that will take your breath away: when Kit finally meets up with a person he has long been searching for, only to find she is dying from using an infected drug needle, what does he do? He helps her take a bath. It is a virtually silent scene, as these two battered souls share a quiet interlude of remembered intimacy and regret. Superb.Some of the grace notes are decidedly kinky: the descriptions of Japanese rope bondage are loving and erotic, leading to one of my favourite lines in the novel: "No one could tie you tighter than you could tie yourself and it was the ropes you couldn't see that bound you tightest." Such economy of action and symbol is a highlight of JCG's honed prose.It has become something of a cyberpunk cliche to use Japan as an example of both cultural assimilation and advancement. The secret to why End of the World Blues feels so fresh and dangerous is the characters: Kit Nouveau (gotta love that name) is a classic Grimwood anti-hero, and he is ably supported by a large cast of outcasts, biker gangsters, perverts and other assorted lost and mad souls.This is literary science fiction that is elusive and beguiling, and thoroughly entertaining and satisfying.
—Gerhard
