I just finished Woken Furies, by Richard Morgan. I always write a bit about each book I finish in a journal I keep for that purpose, and tonight was no different. But rather than scrounge for some poem to review before I head off to bed, I thought I’d just post some of my book review instead.
If you can paint your main character a serial killer, and still have your audience (me) rejoicing when he wins, well, then you can write the shit out of this book. Morgan does bloody, gory, plot-twisting far-future alien thriller like nobody I’ve ever read before. There are quite a few grey areas in my head, some of the fight scenes get a bit muddled at times, and the situation with the minimints, the DeComs, those are underdeveloped, in my opinion, but overall we get a crystal clear picture of all the important stuff in the book–especially Kovaks. And Kovaks is quite interesting. It’s great, because you have what is almost a perfect prism through which to view the story… as an Envoy, he has perfect recall, he sees everything in his peripheral vision, and can call up past memories unbidden when they’re relevent to the plot via a heightened (trained) sense of intuition that isn’t even nearly as hokey as it sounds when I write it. But get this… he isn’t a superman-perfect clone. He’s got his past looming in this novel even more so than the other two, and it rears its ugly head quite a bit before we get to the end.
I’m going to stop my paste-orgy there because I don’t want to add any spoilers, but let it suffice to say that I enjoyed this book at least as much as the other two, while thinking at the same time it had a few more flaws than either of the other two did. I have this half-baked idea that I should write the auther to discuss some of them, but I’m a chickenshit when it comes to that kind of thing. I always seem to convince myself that it means less to me than it does, so I don’t do it. Or maybe it really doesn’t mean all that much to me, (I may have already convinced myself,) and it’s more effort than it’s worth.
Also, I love Morgan’s plot twists. He’s great at them.