This odd book takes a long time to get to where it’s going, and when I got there I wasn’t sure exactly where I was or what I’d just read, and I thought the prose was a bit overcooked at times, and I didn’t really believe in any of the characters as actual people rather than vectors for conveying certain ideas or moving the plot forward, and as a result I didn’t particularly care about anyone for the most part (with some exceptions towards the end)—and despite all this, I found the book strangely compelling and difficult to put down, if only because I had absolute NO idea of where it was heading. I still don’t really know what to make of it, but I found myself thinking about it long after I finished it, so that’s something.

Further reading…