Ed Kay
Couldn't get on with this at all. Writing style was clumsy so often got to the end of a paragraph or even a sentence with no real idea of what was going on. Became unbearable during the first ‘action' passage of the book where Taryn is attacked outside the library. Couldn't really picture the layout of the library, the location of the 4 characters or how the fight unfolded. Then the characters find themselves in another world without much surprise, Taryn learns she's been possessed by a demon without any sense of horror (oh, it must be because I sinned!) and the author is clearly setting up the possibility of her affair with the copper, even though there is absolutely no sexual or emotional tension between them at all. Figure if it's just getting worse after 120 pages I should just cut my losses. DNF.
Struggled through the first half of this a few months ago as it just did not grab or move me in any way. I don't mind simple writing or tales with meaning or a moral, but here there was just nothing to enjoy. The characters were boring, nothing really happened, and I just didn't care one way or another. It wasn't even particularly funny. Uncovering the book at the bottom of a pile today I realise I just don't have the heart to go back.
Was hoping that this would be a good, short introduction to Steinbeck's more substantial works, and Grapes of Wrath is on my ‘to read' list, but now I'm reconsidering!
I grew increasingly infuriated with this book. Perhaps I had too high hopes for it. I'd anticipated a literary version of Dan Brown - all the excitment and adventure, but well written.
As a number of other Goodreads reviewers have pointed out, it's actually the direct opposite of Dan Brown. Everything he does badly, Mosse does well. Unfortunately, it also means that what Brown does well, Mosse does badly. Primarily, plotting.
Brown has puzzles and secrets and mysteries and twists and brawls which drive you relentlessly forward. Sure, it's not pretty, but it's engaging. Mosse seems to edge around all of these things: there are chases and fights, but they entail no peril; there are secrets, but they are mundane; there's what I think is supposed to be a twist but it was already clear after 200 of the 550 interminable pages. (Spoiler: Audric Baillard is Sajhe!)
But there are no puzzles. There's no clever working out, or excited discoveries. As a reader you don't feel like you're joining in the uncovering of a mystery. There's just a ring, and a disc, and some books, all of which have some mystical (religious?) powers.
And there's another difference: Brown's books are very much rooted in reality, the grim treachery of religions, and the people who use them for their own ends. Labyrinth is supernatural, though without much explanation or excitement. You pretty soon get bored of people half-recognising other characters, or feeling like they've been somewhere before, but not knowing why. All this tentative, allusive language is an apt representation of reading the book. There's just no way in. There's a ghost of something fun and compelling, but it's evasive.
And there's absolutely no need for this book to be 500 pages. After 400 pages of tedium, there's then 50 pages of exposition where one character just tells another character what other boring stuff happened.
I'm sure that all the historical research would be interesting to anyone who's keen on this period of history - and I certainly learnt a lot more from this than anything Robert Langdon uncovers on his own terrifying thrill rides through Europe.
But if I've bought a ticket to a theme park I'd much rather spend 10 minutes on a rollercoaster than an hour in a lecture theatre.
I was going to give it 3 stars but have wound myself up writing this and realised that I didn't really enjoy it, at all, so have dropped it to 2 stars.
Wanted to like this far more than I did. I thought it was going to be a mystery but all questions are answered within the first 70 pages. The remainder of the book was just filling in the detail around the children's lives, and the breakdown of the marriage of the aunt who is looking for them.
Areas of tension that should have kept you interested were undermined, and unimportant, so there was no tension. For example, who was the father of the baby? Kat loved the child, enjoyed her life, and the story of the rape showed that actually for her it was a mystical, almost wonderful, experience, so there was no anguish, and no impetus for her (or us) to want to pursue or understand it any further. The throwaway reveal is that it is one of the (hunters/loggers)? that buys drugs. But at that point, you don't care, because Kat doesn't.
The main thread of suspense should be whether Maurice is going to escape - but we already know he does, because they found his body right at the start of the book.
Lots of promise, but the book undermines all of its surprises which makes it a mediocre thriller, and there wasn't enough poetry in the writing to make it worthwhile as literary fiction.
Ploughed through about 40% of this before deciding to call it a day. The narration is all over the place. Paragraphs will start telling one story, then we're in the present, then back in the past at another story, and no clear connection as to why one thing led to another. We keep getting told we'll find things out, but don't. The narrator keeps insisting how consequential OWEN MEANY is, but it's asserted rather than evident in the story. OWEN MEANY IS MAINLY ANNOYING and everything is so tediously directionless. Maybe it's going somewhere (peeking at other reviews maybe something major will happen later in the book) but I just don't care enough to find out.
Having said that there were a few occasions where I laughed out loud, so there is humour in here. Plus I liked the character of Dan who just seemed like a very decent fellow.
I hate not finishing books but time is short and there has to be something more enjoyable out there, than this.
First two thirds of this were surprisingly compelling, as I'm not really a fan of ‘hard sci-fi'. Unfortunately, the final section tipped over from space-thriller into techno-masturbation, and I was intensely bored with page long engineering blueprints describing exactly how the habitats were designed. Yawn.
Also: mermen? Really?!
OK, but disappointing. Felt like a dumbed-down, thriller style sequel, with none of the incredible writing and allegory and allusion that characterised the Handmaid's Tale. Sure, it tied up some loose ends and added depth to the original story, but I don't feel like it added all that much. Not sure how it was deemed worthy of the Booker!
Downloaded and read immediately after finishing Station Breaker as I was totally drawn into this incredibly insane (stupid) world. The sequel suffers from quite a slow start (a bit of farting around at the bottom of a lake) before Dixon gets drawn back into the main plot, but once it gets going it's a fun ride. Rather than the all-out-crazy-action of the first novel, this has more of a detective-thriller vibe, which Mayne handles very competently. Very enjoyable two-book series.
I love Tom Hanks. He's an incredible actor, and seems like a thoroughly wonderful human in real life. Affable, genial, decent. I kind of wish he could be my uncle.
Then it turns out he collects typewriters - and has perhaps used them to knock out a collection of stories, featuring typewriters. As a lover of words and books, and admirer of typewritten text, this is seeming to be all too much. How the stars are aligning! What magnificent tales might Uncle Tom whisper into my eager ears?
Well, unfortunately, it seems Tom is just too nice. His stories are all of the apple pie, white picket fence, “aw shucks”, “American dream” variety that is sickly sweet and devoid of any flavour.
His characters literally say things like “jeez” and “yowza”, wish happy birthday by saying “hoopy boofy” or zanily swear by saying “Jiminy expletive!”. Every single one of them. This isn't how normal people talk - unless it's your parents (or your favourite uncle?!) trying to mimic the current slang to show just how cool and happening they are.
These bland and untroubled characters live in saccharine worlds where no problems exist, other than simple ones they make up for themselves, or are easily fixed by some sub-Dickensian coincidence before anything gets too real.
And as if the twee characters and trite storylines weren't bad enough but the writing is just so... bland. There's not a sniff of an interesting metaphor, or poetic observation. The only characteristic of the writing is the same kooky, gee whiz Walton-esque sing-song nonsense that the characters seem to embody.
I'm so disappointed. The lovable squeeziness and gentle lovability that make Hanks so charming and wonderful in real life just don't cut it when written down in story form. Clearly the complexity and nuance that he can embody so well comes from those who write the parts he plays.
The Sunday Times reviewer seems to have nailed this issue, in a damned-with-faint-praise sentence that the publishers have included on the cover seemingly without irony: “The great strengths of this collection are decency and sentimentality.”
Unfortunately, these wonderful characteristics don't make for interesting or entertaining reading.
Have rated all four books in this trilogy as 4 stars, though I'm still quite unsure about what I just experienced. Initially frustrated by the fact that there were never any easy answers, I've read a few reviews that point out that this isn't a straight science fiction text, but more of a “weird” fiction, a genre I'm not all that familiar with, but which apparently has less of a reliance on tying things up.
There's a lot to enjoy in here, particularly the writing style which is very hypnotic. It washes over you with a kind of steady, wave-like rhythm, appropriately, given the strong presence of the sea in the book - and hypnosis, of course.
This is a terrible review, partly because I feel this trilogy has put me in a kind of fugue state. As if I have been colonised by Area X and am not sure where my own interpretations and impressions end, and Area X itself begins.
It's very haunting, and I think will stay with me for a while. Not so that I can try to solve the mystery (I don't think that is possible) - rather, so that I can revel in it.
Did not get this at all. Was constantly waiting to get drawn into it in some way, but it never happened. I realise that the translator aimed deliberately to convey the voice of the author even if it did not render in a traditional American style (grammatically and narratively) so no doubt there was some difficulty introduced on that front. However, I found it lurching and simplistic and plodding, and I can't put any of that down to cultural differences, just bad writing. Some positive reviews have dismissed criticism saying that this is just “Hard SciFi” as if naysayers just can't handle the fact that the book contains swathes of discussion about physics and mathematics. That didn't bother me - in fact, they were probably the most compelling parts. At least I was learning something! Ditto the historical sections that provided information about the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Everything else was just too straightforward, there was no nuance. Characters were one-dimensional, plot devices were introduced and dismissed without any depth, and the science itself just didn't hold together. There were so many bad explanations and contradictions that I got more and more frustrated:
* Communication with the aliens seemed suspiciously easy - the difficulties of language and translation were dismissed with a sentence claiming that the message contained a 'self-deciphering' system* The Trisolarian pacifist who responds to the first Earth message complains: "I am tired of Trisolaris... We have no art, no literature..." - so how is it that he knows what these things are?* When explaining about the three-dimensional proton unfolding resulting in shapes that looked like eyes, the author pops in a note explaining that of course we don't know what they look like... And then goes on to describe them having an iris, a pupil, and being an eyeball that loses the shape of the eye to become a circle. So, it sounds like we do know what the Trisolarian eye looks like, and it sounds very much like a human one.
Not to mention that the whole three-body 'game' involved almost zero interaction. Where was the gameplay? It was more like an interactive movie. (Although that may well be what video games are like these days.) And how do you fall in love with an alien species you know nothing about, other than the fact that they live in a planetary system with three stars? And how is it that a civilisation that spends a long proportion of its time dessicated and inert can somehow become more technologically advanced than Earth, which has a temperate climate?
Other reviewers have pointed out that the third book in the series is clearly the best, and is brilliant, and whatever. I'm intrigued to see what that might look like, but not so much that I want to wade through a second terrible jumbled turgid mess before I get there. This was a one-book problem for me, and thankfully my game is over.
The major problem with this disappointing follow up is that it bulges with MacGuffins. Problems arise and are just resolved arbitrarily and with little sensible explanation.
Jessica's holed up in an impossible position, surrounded by an army trying to kill her. How will she get out of it? Ah yes, the mysterious, all powerful boyfriend will just show up and chop off their heads.
A reverend blows his brains out on live TV, and leaves behind a tape that suggests something awful happened in his past. What awful thing? How can we recreate an entire scene from audio? Oh, it's cool, the FBI have a clever machine that can detect the tiny sound of a child's ribcage being crushed, and where the people in the room are standing whilst watching it.
But who is the boy? There is no information. Oh, yes there is, here comes the mystical boyfriend again with some cryptic numbers on a mirror, leading to a library and a name. That is then cross referenced against a special secret super database curated by a rich tech geek - friend of the mysterious ex boyfriend! - who runs some algorithm to get the answer...
And on and on. How does clever Jessica solve it? Well, she doesn't. The boyfriend does. Seems he knew what was going on all along. Which kinda makes me wish I could read his story, since he's got all the answers.
Maybe he could tell me how the first crime was committed, what happened to the murderous cop, how was he controlled? How did Grandfather do his bullet trick, and how did it help them prepare to save the pope? How did it save the pope? Did it even save the pope?! (Clearly the pope is saved but no one seemed to actually care about it at the time.)
Reading thrillers and crime writing is a little like experiencing a magic trick and then having the secret revealed. There's a puzzle, and you enjoy watching the detective work backwards to piece it all together. The lure of this series is to see even more magical and impossible murders solved by a magic expert and thereby get some insight into the mind of a magician.
However, there was nothing to learn here and no clever twists to marvel at. Shame.
I picked this up in a store and glanced at a couple of pages which looked interesting and useful, so bought this for my Kindle. Unfortunately, within the first couple of pages the author made clear that this was a ‘spiritual' (aka woo-woo) book, and that I'd have to get on board with connecting to the Source Energy (i.e. God) in order to fully appreciate the advice and direction she was about to impart. There was some sneering about how she used to be such a hateful atheist and how changing her life has given her belief in the all powerful - at which point I felt my hackles rise, and I read the rest of the book with rolling eyes.
Although you'd have to be pretty far gone to read a lot of Sincero's assertions without scepticism. For example:
When you learn to consciously master the energetic realm, believe in the not yet seen, and stay in your highest frequency, you harness your innate power to create the reality you desire.
Conversely, when you show up disappointed or angry or guilty or oblivious instead of being grateful, you're at a lower frequency and thereby less connected to Source Energy and in a less powerful state to manifest good feeling things and experiences into your life. So that's all fabulous and great, but here's where the whole gratitude thing gets really cool. There are lots of ways to feel good and raise your frequency and get closer to Source Energy, but with gratitude, you're actually expending positive energy by sending out thanks, which makes positive energy reflect back to you—every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This makes the manifesting process even more powerful.
Money is currency and currency is energy. As we've discussed, we live in a Universe that is vibrating with energy. Our Universe is abundant, and everything you desire is here, in this moment, waiting for you to shift your perception and your energy and receive it. Money included... Money is energy like anything else, and when you're operating at a high frequency with no resistance to it, and take right action, you can manifest the money you desire.
As British philosophical writer and self-help pioneer, James Allen, states in the quote that opens this chapter, “Mind is the master power that moulds and makes, -and Man is Mind. . . .”—we are the very thinking substance that was used to create us. Hello?! How major is that?!
Meanwhile, even though arrogance and conceit (which are different from self-love and confidence, BTW) are part of the Ego, they're not, as I later learned, the whole dealio.
This display of astonishing brilliance didn't just splat down into being-ness by random, dumb luck, it was thought up.
And whoever you are, puhleeze, stop saying how pathetic you are at making decisions.
‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.' – Eleanor Roosevelt; activist, feminist, superhero, longest-serving First Lady of the United States evah
Meditation, otherwise known as sitting still and thinking about nothing...
...when we meditate, we practice getting into The Vortex and connecting to Source Energy
[meditation] raises our frequency [and] ... opens us up to receive unlimited information and ideas
Meditating is about receiving information from The Universe
This book was, unfortunately, pretty useless. I made an effort to hunt it down in Milan before I started the trail but it turned out to be a waste of time. There are plenty of apps and online information that I relied upon, and this just became additional weight.
The route is broken down into 45 stages, and each is presented with data in 6 sections.
1. Map
The scale of the map is far too small for this image to be of any use, and the fat line that is drawn to show the path obscures any detail that might be possible to make out. This is worse in large towns where there are many streets and signage tends to be poor.
2. Altimetry: distance, altitude, locations
The altitude map is useful as a reference to determine how difficult a stage is, but the locations on the graph often do not match to any labelled on the map or in the text, and vice versa.
3. Distance and difficulty summary
The ‘summary' of the stages did not match with my experience, and seems mainly to reflect the number of miles. For example, a 16km stage with a lot of steep and slippery climbs is graded ‘easy', while a 30km flat stomp on graded tracks is ‘strenuous' or ‘demanding'.
4. Transport, facilities, accommodation
Quite useful to get a sense of what facilities will be available on the route, though Italy being Italy, there are no guarantees that the advertised supermarkets or grocers will be open when you arrive. Accommodation details were often wrong - I found problems with addresses, phone numbers and emails, and came to rely on more up to date information online.
5. Route description
This section generally had me tearing my hair out with frustration. At well signposted stretches it would give lots of detail, and when the arrows disappeared the book would say ‘follow the arrows'. Descriptions are littered with confusion and error:
* “After the underpass, leave the road to the right on a gravel track the other side of the motorway” - the gravel track is THIS side of the motorway, BEFORE the underpass
* At a roundabout with 4 exits the book advises that you “turn right”
* “At via Palermo head down into town...” - but at the junction that street goes up in both directions! Which way is town, right or left?
* Often vague sentences such as “Follow [street] in [compass direction]” are used for junctions where street names are not visible and there are 3 directions to choose from. The frustration in most cases is that there are always easier and clearer descriptions that could have been provided, such as “Follow the canal”!
6. Significant sites and monuments to visit
Many of these describe ancient monuments that are locked, or closed, or no longer exist. Useful to get a quick list of top sites in larger towns (Lucca, Sienna etc).
Other pilgrims were carrying similar looking books by the same publisher which had very detailed hand-drawn maps which looked to be very useful, so note that this review refers only to this specific version. Note, however, that there are at least 2 map applications available for iPhone and Android that are far more useful for navigation, especially when you're lost.
I don't really read Stephen King any more. I read a lot of his early stuff when I was younger, but eventually lost patience as the books got thicker, more baggy, and ended abruptly, almost nonsensically, as if he woke up one morning after typing hundreds of thousands of words and said, “I'm bored now”. Very frustrating as a reader having waded through so much to realise that it wasn't really taking you anywhere.
So it was with some trepidation that I picked up this huge, 700 page monster. And, unfortunately, it was more of the same. But worse. It seems the influence of Owen King not only failed to add some much needed plotting and structure, but also took away a lot of what makes his father so readable: good writing.
There was so little to enjoy here. Characters were bland and one dimensional, the writing workaday, and the plot incredibly simplistic. Clearly this was supposed to be some riff on sexism, misogyny, feminism and the modern world, but other than a few vague paragraphs it didn't really discuss the issues in any depth.
Amazingly, in the acknowledgements at the end of the book the Kings thank an editor who culled the book down from “ a much larger manuscript”. I have nothing but sympathy for her.
Ugh. I read The Da Vinci Code years ago and enjoyed it immensely: the fast pace, tight plotting and clever marriage of the thriller genre with conspiracy theory made it a compelling read. Of course, the characterisation and dialogue and writing were awful, but it was a great page-turner.
This one was just dreadful. The writing was worse than I remember. Every single noun comes with a primary school adjective (for example - not actually from the book! - “the pretty lady watched the tall man walk down the dark corridor”) until you're going tum-te-tum-te-tum in your head and start losing your mind. Buildings are “massive”, cliffs are always “sheer” and there are no libraries or houses or shelves that contain books, just “tomes”.
I probably noticed this more because the plot is a lot thinner, there is very little symbology for Langdon (and his “eidetic memory”) to interpret and I worked out the ‘twist' quite early on.
I did enjoy the fact that the book is very up to date, referencing some modern cultural debates (Catholic crimes, the rise of the New Atheists, creationism vs evolution, existential threats, AI), but since these were represented without any kind of nuance - more storybook simplifications - this wasn't enough to drag my review beyond 2 stars.
Excellent guide along with information to give historical context to the areas you walk through. The Capital Ring seemed to be much better signed than its big brother, the LOOP - especially when its path followed along with other routes such as the Thames Path or Jubilee Greenway. However, there are still areas where signs are absent, or misleading (particular bugbear: not finding signs at complex junctions but instead about 100 yards down the trail, on a straight part of the track, pointing straight on) and it would have been a struggle to find the way without the guide.
The main thing I missed was distances to each of the possible exit points on the route which would have made it much easier to calculate what would be possible in a day's hike, when combining multiple walks.
After recently re-reading the Earthsea trilogy and writing a review condemning those fantasy novels that have no rules to when and how magic can be used, I was initially very frustrated with this book. Spells are cast willy-nilly (to repair clothes, or make a delicious feast, to transport from a village to the tower) but then not utilised in times of need. At least the author recognised this, at one point having Agnieszka notice that “perhaps the spell wouldn't work at such a distance”. But it was still annoying. Plus “the Dragon” - the ‘love interest' of the book - is just an irredeemable misery. At no point did his character soften, or apologise, or behave anything other than churlishly. I'm all for misanthropes but there seemed to be nothing to him at all that would draw Agnieszka to fall in love with him, except for their rather erotic magic-weaving, which I can assume was great for her but left me cold.
Having said all that, I found myself getting drawn into the book almost against my will. The malevolent Wood that “corrupts” anyone who gets drawn into it, and the horrific beasts and praying mantises that come out of it, I found quite disturbing. Add in some interesting magical concepts and eventually more engaging wizardly characters and I found I cared about what would happen in the end, despite the flaws.
On the whole the signage on the LOOP is very good, meaning that you could probably find your way around this track for about 80% of the distance without a problem. However, for those areas where the signs are pointing in the wrong direction (for example, it seems the students have enjoyed realigning every single arrow in Kingston) or absent altogether (especially in wooded areas where multiple tracks cross) then this book proves invaluable. Sometimes the descriptions are a bit weird or arbitrary, or just outdated due to the restructuring of fields or the route itself, but even in these cases the Ordnance Survey maps will come to the rescue. I did the Heathrow stretch in the winter and one of the paths was totally flooded and impassable, but the maps allowed me to find a diversion on the streets without any difficulty.
It may be that there's an electronic route available using some kind of smartphone app, rendering even the maps useless. However, there's a wealth of detail included here that adds an extra dimension to the walk, over and above the information provided on the many LOOP or other information panels in various parks or riverside walks. Sharp provides little nuggets of history at relevant points, including interesting diversions to sights off the route that are worth visiting.
I really enjoyed this walk - and I'd recommend it to anyone living in London as a magnificent escape from the urban sprawl, as well as to gain insights into the city itself - and a great deal of that enjoyment was down to this book.
Orwell's writing is just astounding. Deceptively simple, and beautiful.
His descriptions are so evocative. For example, describing the character of the street (the Rue du Coq d'Or) where his Paris lodgings were located:
Quarrels, and the desolate cries of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over the cobbles, and at night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of the street. It was a very narrow street - a ravine of tall leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse.
plongeur
Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered - a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a man's body.
Then the boat drew alongside Tilbury pier. The first building we saw on the waterside was one of those huge hotels, all stucco and pinnacles, which stare from the English coast like idiots staring over an asylum wall.
The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? ...From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. ‘Anything,' he thinks, ‘any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and - in the shape of rich men - is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as ‘smart' hotels.
1984
Solid thriller, not a bad candidate for my ongoing quest to find a Reacher replacement (Parker still my #1 in that regard).
However, they say imitation is a form of flattery, but I can totally understand why Lee Child is pissed at Baldacci.
Sure, create a new character - make him an Army policeman, maybe he's big and clever - but calling him John, making him also like coffee, and favour the headbutt in confrontations, and be a crack sniper, and have an ‘internal clock', and have a military father and brother, and calling him ‘Puller'... It moves beyond similar to an almost replica.
Puller isn't a drifter and seems to actually have a house and possessions - his focus is also more scientific (forensic training) and technical (he loves the guns) - but these unique traits seem to be overwhelmed by everything that's copied.
It also serves to point out more that Puller isn't Reacher, and made me miss Child's sparse, blunt style (which initially I found hilarious but now find quite nicely echoes Reacher's own methodical and no nonsense attitude) even more.
I guess I'll be waiting a while longer then (or at least until September when the new Reacher is out)...
Saw this recommended as an apocalyptic/dystopian thriller so unfortunately that may have had an effect on my enjoyment of what is clearly a brilliantly written novel. The picture of village life is beautifully drawn: every detail is perfect. And clearly there is overlap with a dystopia in that the local society experiences both unrest and disarray. But it wasn't quite what I expected - I was in the mood for something a little more... anarchic.
I'd like to read more by Jim Crace, though, the guy can write.