Review: Nicola Griffith's Slow River
[* * * * 1/2] of 5
More than a year ago, Sara gave me her copy of Slow River by Nicola Griffith, and it sat on my bedside, unread.
Various excuses kept me from reading it: I wanted to be writing my own material on the subway instead of reading and, for plausible deniability, I didn't want to read a sexy, near-future cyberpunk work which was so similar to what I was working on. It's much easier to claim you haven't plagarized when you haven't read the work in question.
A year later, Lex has fallen by the wayside and I've been reading again so I finally dusted off her old paperback and started into it.
The book ranks up there with some of my favorite books of all time. Published in 1995, Griffith portrays a very familiar future, describing both the real and the unreal with an eye for detail that makes it believable. The book also seems almost pure in its ignorance (and untainted prediction) of the internet hype to come just a few years later. The systems of the future city are plausible and simple enough to be natural outgrowths of our current progress, and are intermingled with the things that invariably stay the same: nature, human emotion, and dimly lit pubs where people talk about sex and money.
The book is told in three fractured time lines, which admittedly makes it a very difficult read if you're not taking it all in a few sittings. It was hard enough remembering what was happening each time I picked the book back up on a subway ride without having to recall where we left off with each timeline, and each transition made me groan, like the season finale of your favorite show which you must wait all summer to see concluded.
Having finished the book, there's really no other way Nicola Griffith could have told the tale. The mystery unravels in each of the timelines (which all involve the main character, Lore) and you piece the story together as Lore does, drawing from each of the story arcs.
The fractured feel of the book also brings an added dimension to Lore's own feeling of being different people; not in the sense of multiple personalities, but in understanding her own human duality and coming to terms with all the various facets of herself. Only in the final chapter, when she begins to understand herself as one person do the storylines collide and conclude the novel.
Nicola Griffith's skill at weaving the story together overrides the annoyance at having to wrench yourself from one timeline to another, and the near future bio-punk epic is required reading... Both literally and figuratively. It was part of Sara's college curriculum, with good reason.
