Sufferance: A Novel
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Average rating3.8
Jeremiah Camp, a.k.a. the Forecaster, can look into the heart of humanity and see the patterns that create opportunities and profits for the rich and powerful. Problem is, Camp has looked one too many times, has seen what he hadn’t expected to see and has come away from the abyss with no hope for himself or for the future. So Jeremiah does what any intelligent, sensitive person would do. He runs away. Goes into hiding in a small town, at an old residential school on an even smaller Indian reserve with no phone, no Internet, no television. With the windows shut, the door locked, the mailbox removed to discourage any connection with the world, he feels safe at last. Except nobody told the locals that they should leave Jeremiah alone. And then his past comes calling. Ash Locken, head of the Locken Group, the multinational consortium that Jeremiah has fled, arrives on his doorstep with a simple proposition. She wants our hero to formulate one more forecast, and she’s not about to take no for an answer. Before he left the Locken empire, Jeremiah had put together a list of twelve names, every one a billionaire. The problem is the people on the list are dying at an alarming and unnatural rate. And Ash Locken wants to know why. A sly and satirical look at the fractures in modern existence, Sufferance is a bold and provocative novel about the social and political consequences of the inequality created by privilege and power—and what we might do about it.
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The majority of the reason I enjoyed this book is in the prose. There is a really interesting mix of this sort of melancholy tone interspersed with both strange humor and some sinister/forboding moments, all wrapped within a bit of film noir trappings. It almost feels like a few tonal steps away from something like the movie Fargo? It's fascinating to read, even though by the end I thought some of the writing patterns showed themselves a bit too plainly (but were still mostly effective).
I did love the choice to have the POV character never speak. It reminded me of a video game like Half Life or Chrono Trigger, and it added to that noir tone. It also forces the supporting cast to reveal their character a little more freely, I thought it worked extremely well.
The plotting here is very strange as well. It seems like the A plot is a slice of life story of a the struggles of small reserve community, and then the B plot is a grandiose billionaire murder conspiracy. Both are compelling, but I'm not sure that either of them were completely successful. I'm sure there are layers of the allegory I'm missing, but I still wanted to see what would happen next and tore through the last half of the novel, so it certainly worked at some level.
I'll have to add some more Thomas King to my backlog, as this was my first of his and he is clearly a talented writer.
I actually finished this a while ago and forgot to update Goodreads.
This is honestly such a hard book to boil down to a simple number. I found the plot to be slow and maybe even a little uninteresting, however the plot was almost irrelevant though since most of what was interesting in Sufferance was Jeremiah's perspective on the world. He had cynical and sarcastic view that I found to be mostly really funny but also incredibly depressing at times. I didn't care what happened next, but I was always looking forward to seeing what Mr. Camp thought of it.
Not my favorite book and I might hesitate to recommend it to others, but I REALLY want to read more from Thomas King.
Fascinating little novel - kind of a combination of contemporary character study and satire, with a little bit of thriller in the background. Some people won't like the ambiguous ending but I don't think there was really a way to end it more definitively that wouldn't have come off a bit silly. I'll be thinking about this one for a while.
