The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch (2018)
Unengaging: meandering
Book cover blurb
Shannon Moss is part of a clandestine division within the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. In western Pennsylvania, 1997, she is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy SEAL's family--and to locate his vanished teenage daughter. Though she can't share the information with conventional law enforcement, Moss discovers that the missing SEAL was an astronaut aboard the spaceship U.S.S. Libra—a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time. Moss knows first-hand the mental trauma of time-travel and believes the SEAL's experience with the future has triggered this violence.
Determined to find the missing girl and driven by a troubling connection from her own past, Moss travels ahead in time to explore possible versions of the future, seeking evidence to crack the present-day case. To her horror, the future reveals that it's not only the fate of a family that hinges on her work, for what she witnesses rising over time's horizon and hurtling toward the present is the Terminus: the terrifying and cataclysmic end of humanity itself.
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My Review
Before buying I read the first chapter of this book. I prefer this method to reading the possibly misleading cover blurb, to get my taste of the book, and I was all in. Outstanding, I thought. Incredibly interesting and tantalisingly confusing. I had to have more.
Unfortunately, the book in its entirety is very different to that opening chapter. The author came up with two very different narratives and for some unfathomable reason decided to merge them into one book, one a time-travelling sci-fi the other a true crime murder mystery, and they clash awfully. I believe they would have produced far better results had they been kept as individual stories.
The time-travelling mechanism felt too vague and incomplete to deliver full understanding. The travelling duration of a time jump didn't add up. At one point travelling thirty years took three months each way, but at another point, a crew travelled five thousand years into the future and returned with the crew still alive? You don't need a calculator to see the problem here.
The true crime sections were bloated with waffle. There was so much unnecessary detail and background that I constantly forgot what the point was. And don't get me started on the fact that the book randomly switched between third and first-person perspectives for the lead character. The writing felt a little lifeless, with no real character to the characters. I didn't care about anyone in this book. What should have been driven by excitement and emotion was tiring and uninteresting.
Oh, there are lots of elements to the characters but nothing to make you feel that you know them, or even want to know them. Even the lead character seems to have been given a prosthetic leg simply to help her character, or extract a little sympathy from the reader, which it doesn't. I pushed on through hoping I might see a recurrence of chapter one. All I got was more depressed. This is such an unhappy story it should come with a governmental health warning.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I've seen a number of positive reviews for this book so take my comments with a pinch of salt and make up your own mind by trying to read it.
My copy of this novel
G.P. Putnam’s Sons hardback edition.
Published in 2018
400 pages
ISBN 9780399167508