While the style is smooth and polished, the plot is rough, ambiguous and unfinished, or so it seems. Not to be recommended for amateurs of mystery and suspense —well, not quite true, I am an amateur of mystery and suspense— let's just say it isn't at all what you'd expect from the blurb.This a cold, deliberate, unemotional vivisection of the 60s, when the counter-culture was the culture; when we rejected the mechanical morality of the past —Good was obeying the Law (and Traditions and Customs), Evil was breaking the Law— and replacing it with sentimental morality —Good was what felt good, Evil was what felt bad— and not a small dose of morbid fascination for outliers and outlaws...The legacy of that decade is impressive, don't get me wrong: men are now allowed to feel, women to conduct the Foreign policy of the strongest Nation in history, blacks to preside over said Nation, we've come a long way, babe — it's just that we all at once chose to leave our thinking hats on the coat-hanger; becoming pacifists in the middle of a vicious cold war; chanting flower-power while withholding condemnation of Manson, Sla, Ira, Plo, Baader-Meinhof, Red Brigades, Ccc, &c…; as well as "generously" granting independence to countries we never invested a red cent to prepare for self-rule, and then superbly ignoring the consequences.I'm rambling.This is a welcome "sit up and take stock" novel about fascinating, if unsavory, characters, written by an obsessive re-writer, always finding "mot juste" and "sentence juste".
Events counterpoised with the moon landing are a central set piece of this novel, which is appropriate since every scene in this novel is as pitiless and barren as the face of the moon. This bleakness permeates whether appropriate or not as Ings twists and turns through events and characters spread over the last half of the 20th century. The right tone for Mozambique in the grips of the genocidal civil war between FRELIMO and the South Africa (and Rhodesia) supported contras RENAMO or London during the blitz, but for swinging 60’s London is more disconcerting, though I much prefer it to a nostalgic sentimental view. Like a more organic David Mitchell, Ings creates a canvas filled with interacting characters from a sixties radical turned human smuggler, a child star turned to a suicidal anorexic performance artist, astronauts, Turing styled math genius who envisions the internet in the 50’s and is disturbed on actually seeing it completed, anti-castro activist turned marijuana smuggler and in settings from Chicago, London, Florida, Mozambique through 70 or so years. As the character descriptions indicate the unreliability of human dreams and the danger of them is a major theme.
What do You think about The Weight Of Numbers (2007)?
Not so great a novel. I think he was trying to write something epic about the way people became more and more connected by technology and history and thought during the 20th century, but the language isn't quite up to it and the book ends up sounding overwritten and implausible.Mixing the characters up with the moon landings and the atrocities of post-colonial Mozambique comes across as a slightly clumsy trick, rather than the serious framing that I think it was intended to be.The last 100 or so pages are a little better and tighter, on the other hand, so maybe the book just needed stricter editing for its first three quarters.
—severyn
I can definitely understand why a lot of people disliked this book. The blurb describing it's synopsis makes it sound like a mystery-esque thriller with a simple plot and a clear antagonist. Thats what I thought when I picked it up. Upon finishing it, however, I realized that the theme and message of the book go much deeper than they are made to sound on the back, and that many people who are looking for simpler, more topical reads may be put off by the story for either lack of understanding or lack of interest.The theme, as far as I can tell, deals with the fact that the human race as a whole is much too concerned with all of the things that make life emotional and dramatic (the "colours of the world," as Ings puts it in the epilogue). That looking at the earth from space puts into perspective just how inconsequential all of our lives really are and that we must learn to look past the colours, whether those include eating disorders, war, love affairs, etc., and look to the black and white, the world of perfect connectedness and rigid formula that Anthony Burden envisions. That, Ings concludes in the epilogue, is where the future lies. Once we realize that the colours only seem important when we are in the middle of them, and that in space (the larger picture) they dont exist at all, will we find order in this world where none seems to exist.Thats what I took the book to mean, and for that I enjoyed it.
—Andrew
I wanted to like this book. I loved The Eye, a natural history so I thought I'd give his fiction a try. But, I just could not enjoy this one on any level. I found it confusing. I don't mean the multiple interconected characters and large philosphical underpinnings, I mean, I had to re-read sentences several times and still wasn't sure what the hell he was saying. I might have plowed on regardless had it not been so damn bleak. If I'm going to have my will to live sapped I'd like a little something to make it worth it the pain.
—Katherine
