The third Richard Powers novel I've read this year. Not as great as Galatea 2.2 or Orfeo. I liked it despite some obvious faults. The two separate story strands don't quite gel, though each was good alone. And his metaphors are still remarkable and leftfield, but to someone a little less enamoured of the author's style, they might look overblown. They are little worlds unto themselves, part of that mindfulness his sentences have, often near-aphoristic, each like a moment one is inside: which I think is because he dictates his books, slowly (to well-trained software) rather than typing them.Like his other work, Plowing has the rare combination of the highly technical and academic alongside the empathic & emotional. As I've said before - but the reviews of Plowing remind me - some readers seem not to notice both, and the same book is criticised by some people for being academically cold and detached, by others for being schmaltzy. Not something you see often. (And I guess the latter aren't the sort of commenters to link it to 'the new sincerity', DFW etc.) I like the way Powers' main characters feel deeply yet don't go entirely off the rails - typically they throw themselves into their work, and get a lot out of it.The work here (in one of the two barely interlocking stories) is on virtual reality. I'm not sure how realistic it is that the lead character Adie, an artist previously unfamiliar with computers, is involved - she was at university with Steve, one of the programmers, who advised hiring her - but it adds to the multiple worlds of knowledge and outlooks in the novel, and she picks things up well: Powers is the last person to stereotype an unbridgeable arts / science divide. For some reason, technologies are 5-10 years ahead of where they were in the real world, at some points passing into SF, it being set c.1990 - but the characters and their group dynamics reminded me a lot of an old favourite, Microserfs - just somewhat darker and cleverer and more complicated. They likewise see themselves as pioneers at the dawn of a new age: read as optimistic retro-futurism it rivals space travel stories of the 50s and 60s. Steve says: "Code is everything I thought poetry was, back when we were in school. Clean, expressive, urgent, all-encompassing. Fourteen lines can open up to fill the available universe." And there's the same mutual acceptance of weirdness I remember from 90s geeks at university - a different place from the combative, polarised discussion that gets called geek culture c.2015. Would parts of the book be tedious or difficult for readers who'd never done any programming? Possibly. And in any case it occasionally gets into more specialised areas: there's only so far I can stretch what I know from old rudimentary Java and BASIC, and it's a long time since I hung out with people who'd grok the terminology for coding economic modelling on one of the labs a side-projects, people who'd be able to say exactly where the science becomes fiction, before the magic realism is apparent to the general reader.The main project, though, prompts the question of why virtual reality became something of a dead end. I daresay there are essays. Why is everything simply on screens? I can't stand the idea of Google Glass, but I'd absolutely love a gadget (glasses? headset?) that gave the full 360 degree effect of going for a walk or drive anywhere in the world in Street View.The other strand of Plowing the Dark is about an American TEFL teacher taken hostage in Beirut in 1986. In this novel published in 2000, Powers is already alive to the potential discomfort increasing numbers of present-day readers might have with this as a fictional scenario, on racial grounds: the teacher, Taimur, is half Persian, and alongside the captors, another oppressive force in the story is the memory of his WASP ex-girlfriend, with whom he had a fraught and stressful relationship. Neither is Powers someone who'd conveniently ignore the realities of history, so other hostages with whom Taimur makes contact are Europeans. Skilful handling of a tricky subject. The chapters about Taimur take up about a third of the book and the reader gets long breaks from their cluastrophobic environment in the Seattle IT lab. (He's one of those authors who seems to understand that things can get too much, and who can structure a difficult story so as not to overload the reader - he did that in Orfeo too. In this book that understanding of fear and trauma was also reflected in his idea of using the virtual reality environment as a way to treat phobias - building up through artificial, safe exposure, in a way methodologically similar to EMDR but employing vivid visuals instead.) The hostage chapters are told in second person. It's an unpopular form and there are plenty of posts elsewhere on GR by readers who dislike it. Reading this, I think I figured out one of the reasons why: it can be excessively intimate and invasive. I don't always find it so - How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia used it brilliantly to turn the material of a serious news feature into detailed understanding and empathy - but If On A Winter's Night A Traveller annoyed me when re-attempting it a couple of years ago; as I felt then, I'd have gladly thrown the copy at Calvino and told him to bugger off and get out of my space. Taimur's story inevitably has a lot of references to body positions, pain and emotions of just the sort that get under the skin. I wonder if I'd have wanted to read this if it had been by most (by all but a handful of) writers. At any rate I would have experienced or endured it differently. I've read dozens of interviews with Powers, and I realised whilst reading this novel that I sort of trusted him, in a way one rarely would a person not spoken to directly, so I was comfortable opening up to the character's experience, rather than partially shutting it out. It also made a difference that he's not the sort of person whom you'd assume had a sadistic twinkle in their eye whilst writing a scenario like this and imagining the reader's experience. (I think I would sometimes in that situation, even if conscience might make me re-write, so I'm not out to damn anyone.)What attracted me to this particular novel out of all his work was, unusually, its circumstances of writing: Powers spent the best part of a year in solitude, other than short trips to buy essentials. The Seattle tech sections were much more social, contained far fewer scenes of solitude than I expected. And there's a drawback: the way it was created - I understand he did all his research first, and then just wrote, alone - is probably responsible for the shortage of pop-culture references: the noise of the outside world wasn't there to prompt the inclusion of culture outside his own taste. As with the low number of humorous scenes, it's not something that bothers me whilst reading Powers. I just notice later; when she surfaced again to quote from the first line. But a bunch of programmers aged 20-40: I'm sure some of them will be big fans of various contemporary bands / TV shows / films as well as the old text adventures which are part of several scenes; instead we're in too much of a bubble, and there's only the odd mention of staples like Star Wars & Trek, and one character listening to Wagner in his flat. Again, re. Taimur's scenes, if a guy of about 30 is stuck on his own for years, some of what he things about would probably be films, TV, popular music - he tries to reconstruct books in his head, why not films too?[Gawd, this review is getting long. I meant to stop writing them at this length as it's pretty time consuming. For me and for you lot.]Articles and interviews about the writer say that each of his novels springs from minor themes in the previous one. There's so much of Orfeo in here though, especially in Ted, a university friend of Adie and Steve, a brilliant unsung composer - but a womaniser unlike the near hermit of the recent novel: it's as if Orfeo zoomed in on Ted and split him into two characters: the introvert composer and his madcap impresario quondam-best-friend. (Rather like Hunter Thompson split himself in The Rum Diary.) And as in both Orfeo and Galatea there's a minor character with an acquired disability affecting the nervous system - I appreciate so much that someone as brilliant as Powers also has time and attention for the experience of people who lose abilities, without any hint of snobbery. These characters are always their own people, very interesting people importantly, but they are realistically isolated (even if they are middle class and not in the most dire circumstances): he respects them but doesn't try to prettify their situation.I can see why others might not rate this book so highly - the occasional flashes of magic realism jar at times, and it wouldn't be the best introduction to the author - but I for one found plenty to like about it. An intense experience, as his novels tend to be.[Incidentally, Taimur Martin's names are basically anagrams of one another, if you allow for rotating one letter. 'Adie Klarpol' (or Adia Klarpol) looks strange, like it should also be an anagram or similar, but I can't see one. Have I missed anything?]May 2015
I'm a great fan of Powers and have read several of his books. This one may be his masterpiece for me. Set between 1989 and 1992, it tells two tales. One is of a team of technical whizkids who have been given money and freedom to develop a room in virtual reality in conjunction with an artist, Adie. Although a bit dated for the modern reader living in the world of video games, the wealth of Powers' ideas and his grasp of the cosmopolitan backgrounds of the various characters are both fascinating and involving. The other tale is also of a room, a dark dank room in Lebanon where an American English teacher of Persian origin, Taimur, has been taken hostage by the Hezbollah. This tracks Taimur's mental and physical decline, sparing no details of the humiliation to which he is exposed. The two tales are brought together in the end in a meeting of the virtual and the real. Powers is brilliant, with a stunning breadth of knowledge. If you don't have problems with being challenged, stimulated and at times frustrated, this remains a great read.
What do You think about Plowing The Dark (2002)?
Here's a solid attempt at putting religion and technological capacity on even footing (not unlike Snow Crash). By religion I mean a general spirituality, though not general in the generic sense or in a way to mean a lesser sort of activity, but in the profound concurrence of humanity and those spiritual questions. The key to Plowing the Dark I suppose comes from equating the search for profound art or the mimicry thereof with the strength of human thought (an idea I approve). We're each of us in constant communication with the past--and in some ways the future, though the past is more readily identified, as it creeps in through image (graven, sacred, sculpted, painted, or sketched), building, and (more recently) sight, sound. Through this conversation, on-going though not eternal, we compare our depths, our almost fathomed and nearly completed, none of which is ever quite the level we hope to reach. It is in us not our stars and all of that. Rich Powers excavates the human through two intertwined stories: that of a team working in virtual reality, building simulacrums of original art alongside sensations of depth, movement, and sound; and a second story of a man held captive by terrorists, and his memory's revolt into the long-forgotten, half-remembered, or almost-quite moments, voices, and experiences of which most of us don't think because of near-constant external stimuli. In Powers' view it is up to the artist to exceed those mundane sensations and trip us into new ways of thinking. Though it takes the stability of civilization to attempt fantasy (an imprisoned mind has only itself), it is nevertheless the artist's job to forever question power and privilege and to work against the unearned forms of each. Religion, then, may be the all-encompassing comfort of attempt and assignation, those worried moments of 'what might we be' within which each of us becomes more aware of how and what we are, and through that awareness comprehend more than all.
—Brian Gatz
Full of beautifully written aphorisms about the digital era's connection with humanity via the story of a virtual reality design team working in the late 1980s. It's cleverly juxtaposed with a Beirut hostage's own inner flights of imagination to while away the horror of his captivity. However, this is a novel I admired but couldn't wholly enjoy. The two stories come together right at the end in a rather deus ex machina, magical realism way, which felt rather unearned for me. Plus I was bemused by how a bunch of cutting-edge computer programmers in 1990 can have photos of Mr Spock and Yoda on their office wall yet there's not a single reference to the Next Generation TV series's Holodeck, which had a high profile in geek culture from January 1988 onwards (rather sad that I looked this up...)Mr Powers is also one of those writers who likes ideas more than characters. I'm fine when this is applied to short stories, but in a 400 page novel I feel the reader deserves a little more variety in characterisation. Instead, everyone speaks in a Richard Powers-y way, and the dialogue sometimes just reads like a stream of interchangeable philosophising quotes - pure sock puppets for the author. As a result, this novel about reality often didn't feel real enough. But the events were certainly believable - particularly the disturbing Beirut narrative.
—Dickon Edwards
Somewhere in 1999, a young Richard Powers is making a list. He has just seen The Matrix and has an idea. He makes a list of what he wants to keep, and what he'll change. Rather than use a massive virtual reality simulator, the people in his story would build one. It would be un-filmable, but that would be OK. In his opinion, movie's visuals held it back, anyway. Images let the audience understand way too much of what was going on. He'd have to be sure to set aside some room for pointless exchanges of pseudo-intellectual banter where key ideas are communicated only through subtext. All those action scenes should go too, of course. Why couldn't the characters simply work in a dark building and periodically hold meetings? The Matrix didn't even show a single office retreat!
—Ben
