Rose/House
Ratings40
Average rating3.4
This novella takes us into a surealist noir-like detective story where unexplained strangeness is the order of the day.
A famous architect builds a house that runs on an artificial intelligence. In this way the house continues as the repository of all his major work after his death. Think of HAL in 2001 A Space Odyssey, but less murdery. The house remains locked except for one person the AI will allow in as an archivist, but only for seven days each year.
One day the house calls the local police station to say there is a dead body inside. How did that guy get inside? Who killed him and how? How will the police investigate when they can't get inside to examine the scene?
The story is part locked room mystery, part gothic horror, part police procedural, part sardonic poke at one of the detectives who keeps wondering if he's in some noir detective story at last.
Overall it's a rather brittle story, as if reality is being bent almost to snapping point. Martine doesn't give anything away and the reader is left to work out their own take-away from it all. Nothing is really explained, the tension builds and falls away in unexpected moments, and the ending doesn't resolve the questions that the book presents.
Perhaps deliberately for a book about AI, this all feels very uncanny valley. Something is off throughout, and the whole thing feels like a classic locked room detective story filtered through the scratchy eyeballs of someone who has been awake for far too long already. It’s a very well crafted trick, and good vibe for a futuristic story that is very much in conversation with it’s predecessors (there are several direct references to The Haunting Of Hill House, for instance) but it also highlights the chief flaw of this short novel - it feels consciously worked on, something that is too openly striving for an effect. Basically the bones are too visible and there isn’t enough flesh in the story to cover them. It’s still an intriguing set up, but it’s too cerebral and designed to ever become fully engaging.
Overview: A thought provoking, beautiful, haunting and disturbing story from one of the most skilled writers of today.
More detailed thoughts: Arkady Martine has not published much fiction, however her debut Texicalaan Series has impressed me as possibly the highest quality, most thought provoking, moving, and beautifully written fiction of this century so far. That is very high praise, though looking at a list of awards for those books shows that I'm not alone in being impressed.
Of course I was a little nervous trying this book. It was the first non-Texicalaan book that I'd read of hers and instead of being based in a wholly imagined society, it was based in China Lake USA. I knew it would be different - but was I going to be disappointed. Were the Texicalaan books a fluke?
This story, which centres around a sealed AI managed house in the desert containing a mysterious death, is very different to the Texicalaan books. In many ways it is the opposite. The Texicalaan stories were a riot of the senses - of colours, tastes, smells, sounds and textures and there were so many different people with such varied personalities.
When I think of this book I think of the sound of wind-blown sand.
This book is quiet, it is slow, there is little action. There is a lot of reflection, questioning. The text itself is so cleverly written - both in the words themselves, but also in the use of layout and punctuation - that things do not need to be said. The story and the investigation progresses, but the questions that the reader is invited to ask of themselves and the world grows.
By the end I felt like I could scarcely breathe.
This is one of those books that is an experience. I'm not sure that a review can do it justice. It is profoundly different to the Texicalaan books, but like them you really have to read them to appreciate what make them special. It is the experience and the questions that experience raises that make these works of art.