Neal Stephenson’s latest novel is a contradiction of a book: a taut, fast-paced thriller that spans 1,000 pages and took me a month to read.
Richard “Dodge” Forthrast is the creator of the popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) T’Rain. We first meet Richard at the annual Forthrast family reunion in Iowa, and the book starts out slowly as we meet certain of Richard’s family members. We’re introduced to his niece, Zula, and her boyfriend Peter. We meet Richard’s brothers, Jacob and John. There are stories of Richard’s days as a smuggler crossing the border between Canada and Idaho. And lots and lots of information regarding the creation of T’Rain.
Stephenson takes his time kicking the plot into gear. 100 pages slowly pass before it really arrives, but it’s never a chore; Stephenson has a gift for being highly readable, and is somehow able to make reading about firearms or midwestern cuisine or the creation of a geographically-plausible video game world consistently entertaining.
But then the titular, brilliantly-conceived “REAMDE” virus makes its appearance, and suddenly Zula and Peter find themselves abducted by a Russian mafioso. While they head to China to root out REAMDE’s creator, back in the western hemisphere Richard is left to try and piece together what has happened to his niece. And still that’s just the tip of the iceberg: when things finally throw down in China about a third of the way through the book, a bevy of new players are introduced and only then do you realize that the real story is just starting. What’s left is 700 pages of straightforward globe-hopping thriller, filled with spies and terrorists, not to mention the occasional hacker and militant libertarian.
Sadly, the books started to drag a little for me around the halfway mark. If you read many thrillers, you’ll know that they’re not particularly long books; 300-400 pages on average, perhaps. But the thriller portion of Reamde runs a solid 700 pages, and though there’s plenty of action, there’s also a lot of what feels like downtime. It got to the point where I had to force myself to pick the book up every night, but the funny thing is, once I started reading, I’d get sucked right back in. The pages didn’t exactly fly by, but I was absolutely riveted all the same.
Still there’s an advantage to Reamde’s length, and it’s that events and characters feel that much more real. The story itself takes roughly three weeks, and lengthy and copious amounts of detail make it feel like three weeks. (That it took me four weeks to read probably has something to do with it as well.) And Stephenson’s created a diverse cast of well-realized characters that you come to love, or come to love to hate. The day after I finished reading, I looked over and saw the book sitting on my nightstand and was actually saddened that I wouldn’t be reading it anymore. I already missed Richard and Zula and Csongor and Sokolov and Olivia and Seamus and… well, you get the picture. If you had asked me at the halfway mark, I would have told you I’d consider Reamde a “read once” book; but now I’m fairly certain that, years from now, I’ll be picking it up again to revisit some old friends.
If I had to come up with one real beef about the book, it would be that the title is pretty misleading. It hopefully doesn’t spoil much (and if so, I’ve spoiled far more already!) to say that the book has very little to do with the REAMDE virus—nor with the T’Rain game, despite the numerous pages devoted to detailing its creation and inner workings. Put plainly, T’Rain exists mainly for REAMDE to exist, and REAMDE is there to kickstart the plot, and little else. You could probably drop a bare minimum of 50 pages from the novel just by trimming away the T’Rain infodumps, and lose little from the story besides some of its “Stephensonesque” quality—but then, those random asides and tangents have long been part of Stephenson’s charm.
Despite being somewhat overlong (I didn’t even mention the drawn-out—and by “drawn-out” I mean “Michael Bay in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen drawn-out”—final climactic showdown) Reamde still manages to be a fantastic book. In a nutshell, it’s “What if Neal Stephenson wrote a thriller?” and I absolutely loved it. [4 out of 5 stars]
Reamde
Tags: 4 stars, book reviews, books, lt early reviewers