I had really high hopes going into The Underwood See, and that should have been my first warning sign. I've already established in this blog that sequels have a very hard time living up to their predecessors, because the original was so... original. The only reason I expected great things from The Underwood See is because the trilogy's first sequel, Small Eternities, was such a surprise. It was really hard to live up to A Crack in the Line, a brilliantly realistic and imaginative science-fiction novel about parallel universes, but live up it did, and Small Eternities was every bit as impressive and elegant as its predecessor.
Why, when an author has a formula that works, does he choose to walk away from it? All right, all right -- the out-there science-fiction nature of this trilogy (billed as three parts of one book -- in the biz we call it the Lord of the Rings strategy) required that someone explain everything by the end. But not to this degree, and not with this amount of extraneous information and dialogue. I mean, this book just drags on and on!
For the uninitiated, Michael Lawrence's Withern Rise Trilogy (sometimes called The Aldous Lexicon, and comprised of A Crack in the Line, Small Eternities, and The Underwood See) is about a teenager named Alaric, who stumbles into another reality one day to find a girl named Naia living his life -- but plus a mother. The idea behind the title is that Alaric's mother died months ago in a freak train accident, but in Naia's reality, she lived. The first book is about the two trying to figure out the nature of their realities; the second introduces more characters and another layer to the science (fiction). Both books have a lot of philosophical wheel-spinning and not much plot: this is very much a story about situation. Each book also has an ending that is as shocking as it is elegant.
I can't say, as I did with Jasper Fforde, that Michael Lawrence was running out of ideas for this book, because there are certainly plenty of new elements. Several new realities include one interesting overgrown forest (much in the vein of C.S. Lewis's first Narnia book), and much of the ending was clearly foreshadowed in other books. But there are just as many elements that are unnecessarily re-used: Aldous's character becomes tedious instead of mysterious, and the new primary Alaric is ripped from a gimmick from the first book that should have remained a gimmick.
The problem with this book really isn't the ideas, though. The series is just getting tired. One reason for this might be that there's actual plot in this one. It's subtle: there's the subplot in the forest, there's subplots of various characters all looking for each other -- but there is rarely a time when the characters have nothing to do, which was actually a plus in previous books when they characters could sit and think. This instead is replaced with petty details from history, and flowery description of locations.
Also, Lawrence has to do some backpedaling to reverse some effects of the previous book, having killed off a major character. He introduces many new versions of Alaric instead, but doesn't spend enough time developing any of them, and so Naia is much more interesting than Alaric. Since this Alaric should have gone through the events of book 1, it's surprising that he's not more interesting, but Lawrence simply doesn't spend much time with him. Fortunately, we've gotten used to the new Alaric enough by the end that I'm okay with the ultimate twinning outcome. (This was something I'd subconsciously hoped for since the beginning. It's not every day you get to speak with your alternate-reality mind twin. I always found the conflict between them an interesting dynamic, but couldn't wait for them to get to like each other.)
In the end, the reality-bending ideas are still present, but they're bogged down with too much exposition and description. The few parts that felt just as good as the previous books were those immediately after the storm, in merging two realities. The book feels a bit like my blog posts sometimes do: I plan them out, know all the points I'll make, but the end result is inferior to the way I heard it in my head. In Michael Lawrence's case, this book isn't as fleshed out as it could have been, and certainly not as elegant.
Still, all that said, anyone interested in imaginative fiction should pick up this series, or at least the first two books of it. I've spoiled a good deal of this one, but made an effort not to give away too much of the others because they're so good. And the exposition was kind of necessary for this one, so I'll give this book a little leeway.
No comments:
Post a Comment