What the Tanj...?
First of all, a disclaimer and an apology: I didn’t get very far beyond page 100 of Ringworld, and so my review is of those pages only. My sole motivation for getting that far in the book (aside from pride - I rarely put a book down, once I have started) was to get to the Ringworld of the title, and see what that had to offer. By the time we reached Ringworld, however, I so thoroughly hated all the characters, and most of all the style of the writing, that continuing wasn’t even an option.
Ringworld is the most annoying book ever written. Although it is ostensibly about a giant alien artefact which is explored by the heroes, for some reason the author does everything in his power to take this quite exciting premise and, page by page, scientifically syphon off any element of fun.
The first aspect of the no-fun is the characters. Ringworld's characters consist of: a giant cat from a race of warriors (ludicrously) called “Speaker to Animals”; a hairy Clingon, if you will. Speaker has the tedious characteristic of taking everything anybody says as an insult. You can imagine how quickly this gets boring. Then there is Nessus, an unconvincing alien with 3 or 5 heads ( i cant remember), who is terrified of everything. You can imagine how quickly this gets boring. Next up is Teela - a vapid girl whose only role is love interest for the hero. Ah yes, the hero, possibly the flattest character in all literature, including Anna Karenina after her train accident. He is called Louis Wu, he is 200 years old, and beyond that, there is nothing you could say about him. I think actually, we have, just now, dwelt on his personality for longer than the author did when thinking him up, that’s how thin he is.
No Fun part 2 - the pace. The first 40 pages is spent meeting the characters. They all agree to go on a mission to find the Ringworld (a mysterious alien artefact which there is a picture of on the front cover). Unfortunately, the artefact isn’t reached until page 100 or so. This would be justified if the journey to reach the artefact was loaded with an ever-increasing feeling of suspense, or if disaster met the expedition at every turn. Unfortunately not. In fact, the journey to Ringworld goes exactly to plan. It is true that the book surprised me in this respect. In fact, if you are expecting any excitement or drama in the voyage to the Ringworld, the author cleverly confounds your expectations by giving you 100 pages consisting of the four ‘characters’ described above airing their party quirks in place of personalities, whilst they change spaceships, discuss flight trajectories, express mild surprise at each other’s cultural differences and heat up TV dinners.
No Fun part 3 - the prose. Amazingly, considering how bad the characters and pacing are, the author’s real weak point seems to be writing prose. Here, the writing is as flat and lifeless as a Volvo care manual, only a good deal more irritating. The irritation comes from affectations such as the decision to use the made up swearword ‘Tanj’ to add an element (I suppose) of verisimilitude to the future scenario. “Tanj!”, exclaims the hero, every couple of pages, “What the tanj!” You can imagine how quickly this becomes boring. Tanj is irritating, but not as bad as “By the mist demons!” (page 80). Aside from the Tanjing, I also found irritating (as another reviewer has here commented) the immature and prurient attitude to sex that seems to pervade the novel. It is cringingly embarrassing to read a paragraph where the characters talk about the ‘straddle position’ before the author fades to black. In Ringworld sex is so important it has to be mentioned, nearly all the time, but it’s always a joke or comes with a raised eyebrow, and ironically, for a book whose title could easily come from a top shelf publication banned everywhere but Sweden, sex is ultimately something so terrifying it can’t be shown. I’ve no problem with not showing sex, but then why bring it up in the first place, in such a sniggering schoolboy fashion.
It is niggling things like this that make Ringworld such an uncomfortable read. It belongs, no doubt, in the same category as Arthur C Clarke’s ‘revelatory’ style of sci-fi, where most of the excitement and suspense derives from delivering small revelations that beg yet another mystery to be solved later on, as in “Rendevous with Rama”. In that book, Clarke’s skill at storytelling makes you really care what the biopsy of an alien crab will reveal about the species that built it. In Ringworld, Niven seems to have achieved the opposite. He takes an interesting concept of an inconceivably big piece of engineering encircling a star, and manages to kick all the fun out of it, so that by the time you get to the artefact itself, you no longer care what the tanj is inside it.
I wish someone would reply to my review and convince me that I should hold on and read the rest of the book because it gets a lot better and fully justifies it’s great reputation. If so, could they please tell me on which page this acceleration of pace occurs, so I can be sure not to miss it.
No comments:
Post a Comment