Book Blogging
Spoilers for Dan Simmons's novel The Hollow Man ahead. Read at your own peril.Okay, so having finished Dan Simmons's Ilium and followed it up with the sequel, Olympos, I went back and read an earlier novel of his, The Hollow Man. I did this mainly because, the last time I talked with her, Cyn told me not to read it; she was reading it, and didn't like it at all. I decided to be contrary.
I have to admit, it's easy to find reasons why Cyn might not have liked it. For a long time it plods along as an earnest, if unlikely, tale of telepathy and loss; then, around page 200, it turns briefly (but not briefly enough) into one of Dean Koontz's lesser works. It's almost as if Simmons's editor told him, "Look, I can get you a cover blurb from Stephen King, but you'll have to put in a serial killer who wears dentures with razor blades embedded in them. Can ya do that?"
Even without that detour into a whole other genre, the book had other problems, including the suggestion that suicide really is the answer to life's problems. I could certainly understand where someone might have issues with that. I also see, in retrospect, a somewhat belittling attitude toward women (was it just me, or did Simmons never mention what Gail's career was? and why did Jeremy have to call her 'kiddo' all the time?).
But for me, one of the biggest problems was its pushiness (for lack of a better word). Simmons hung a great deal of his contract with the reader on his or her willingness to not merely accept the idea of telepathy, but to accept the specific quantum-physical and mathematical bases for telepathy Simmons posits. It's almost as if he doesn't trust us to suspend disbelief; instead, he has to prove to us that telepathy is possible.
That's a little unfair, I suppose, because the specific scientific underpinning he sets out is critical to the plot of the book. Still, the whole thing feels altogether too preachy, to the point of actually laying out equations in the book that not 1 in a million readers would understand. Why bother?
Interesting to me is that this book (written in the early '90s) has at its core some of the same ideas as Ilium and Olympos: the notion of consciousness as a standing wave, and the idea that great and/or powerful minds (such as Homer or Shakespeare) can give birth to entire new universes of possibilities. But these later books take a completely different approach; instead of insisting that we understand and accept these ideas, Simmons is now basically saying, "Hey, c'mon, this is fiction. Just accept the premise and let's go have some fun." And damn it, we do accept it. I don't know if this means that Simmons has become a better writer in the last 10 years, but it certainly suggests as much. I'll have to read more of his earlier stuff to judge.
posted by MeanMrMustard @ 8:19 PM
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