The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey
I want you to keep in mind while you read this review a few facts. First off I want to state as a fact that Mike Carey, writing here under the super-secretive pen name M.R. Carey is a writer I really like and respect. Second, consider that I have read almost every release he has in prose. I almost loved his run on Hellblazer. The final fact I want you to consider is I would go so far as to say that his novel The Girl With All the Gifts is a masterpiece. I do not say that lightly.
I was rooting for this book that just got nominated for the PKD award and I am not going to argue that it is bad. In fact, it is probably a good book but if I am being honest and that is my purpose when writing a book review, I really didn’t like this book. I considered not finishing it which is almost unthinkable for me and my reading relationship with this author.
This book was built on writing tricks that are pet peeves of mine, so you might not mind it as much as I did. There is actually a neat story here, and I like the concept but the delivery just killed me. That was the stumbling block for me and The Book of Koli.
It is first-person which is already my least favorite way to tell a story in the novel form. I think it locks the storyteller into breaking their own rules the way a found footage movie does. We know the storyteller lives at the end of the tale, and we have to hear it in that character, not the author’s voice. That being said a well-composed first person narrative like King’s Delores Claiborne for example will slip out of my mind as I get carried away with the story. First-person can work for me but I prefer to work in the author’s voice.
The problem with The Book of Koli is the first person was so odd and so different than I was constantly paying attention to it and not the story. Set hundreds of years-in-the-future after the fall of civilization in Ingland of the former Yewkay the prose was “written” by someone who doesn’t knowns’ stuff like us as educated folks. I mean this is the whole book, at least early on was so dialect heavy that I just couldn’t flow with the story.
That sounds insanely difficult to write, like signing your signature with your left hand after a lifetime of using your right. I was at the same moment annoyed and impressed with this. I think what Carey is doing here is very difficult and an interesting choice to say the least. It just didn’t work for this reader at all. As the story progresses Koli gets a solar-powered AI-driven “dreamsleeve” which is basically a conversational iPod that teaches him. The prose gets somewhat better and easier to flow with.
(Note: I understand why Carey felt the need when Koli was explaining how he got into heavy metal that to note that he was listening to classic sabbath, and I aware this is a push up my glasses nitpick but it took me out of the story and seemed a little too cute that this young man a few centuries after the collapse of society would understand classic era Black Sabbath vs any other era. Besides Dio Sabbath is great.)
TBOK is the first part of a trilogy and one thing it does really well is ending with a compelling hook that has me interested in where the story will go even though I didn’t enjoy the book along the way. It is the story of Koli who lives in Mythen Rood - a village after the fall of civilization, there are little bits of tech here and there but life is midevil and contained mostly. One of my problems with the novel is it promises killer trees, which are the monsters at the gate.
That is a huge problem for me as the monsters at the gate remain the most interesting element to me after I closed the book the last time. The first act takes too long to develop and by the time the stakes are set, I was checked out wishing I was reading another book.
I have made clear that I write with outlines and I prefer reading novels that feel well-plotted. It seems to me that Carey started this journey going in a different direction and vibe. There is nothing wrong with the story here. I think that this novel will work for some people. I don’t think this is a bad novel. It is probably a good one. It just didn’t work for me, too many personal dislikes involved and that is not on Carey or this novel. He had a mission in mind when he started this book and I suspect he knew he would lose some people. That is a choice artists sometimes make. Not everything is for everyone. Also, Carey just set a very high bar for himself by writing a masterpiece with his first M.R. Carey novel.
The funny thing is that the hook is good enough at the end I do want to know what happens in the rest of the trilogy.
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