I admire die-hard Neal Stephenson fans who splash out for the hardback; reading this paperback ARC of REAMDE without using a lectern is an invitation for carpal tunnel syndrome. That heftiness is par for the course with Stephenson, and REAMDE shares other hallmarks of his work: set-pieces of epic scale; complex international intrigues; and obsessive digressions into the minutia of subjects such as firearms handling procedures, the irrational logics of fiat currency, the equipping of hijacked fishing boats for unexpected jaunts in international waters, and the best way to fly an illegally chartered private jet non-stop from Xiamen, China into North American airspace without being detected. Oh, and virtual worlds, of course, in the form of the online fantasy RPG “T’Rain”, whence emerges the titular computer virus.
What is completely absent from REAMDE, however, is a speculative novum. It’s undoubtedly a text that partakes in science fiction as a mode of looking at the world (and the relationships between things in that world), but REAMDE is written as a contemporary technothriller, even though it fails Bruce Sterling’s litmus for that genre: the President of the United States of America does not appear as even a minor character.
As a devoted reader of Stephenson, the chewy delight of of his prose alone—retaining the ornate hyperfocus of Anathem and the Baroque Trilogy, even while it eschews the invented and anachronistic languages that haunt them respectively—was a source of great enjoyment, but here’s a lesson about harbouring expectations. The science fictional attitude of REAMDE had me watching from the corner of my eye for the moment when something classically Stephensonian would sneak in and crank up the WTF factor a few notches: a non-existent island micronation with a crazy name, maybe, or a mysterious guy called Enoch, or some technological advance that deftly switches the author’s map for the reader’s territory, rendering the familiar momentarily—maybe even permanently—strange. But it’s not there: unless I missed it, REAMDE is pure of science fiction’s speculative urges. It is, perhaps, a realist technothriller… or at least the equivalent of a realist technothriller for a world wherein we’re increasingly unsure what’s real.
To describe REAMDE as a technothriller is not to belittle it. If anything, it is to belittle that genre; if the size and prose density of REAMDE doesn’t put off the post-Clancy market, Stephenson’s refusal to establish a strict black-and-white moral axis or to fetishise the nation-state as anything other than a hollow anachronism may see them bounce off pretty hard. Even so, I imagine that anyone who makes it through the first hundred pages—the time it takes Stephenson to set up his game board and get the pieces moving—will find themselves wanting to finish it.
As I’m making sweeping homogenizing statements about the technothriller readership, I might as well ponder whether they’d be as bothered by Stephenson’s characters, who—despite being drawn in amazing detail and complexity—never quite escape the Central Casting archetypes that one imagines they were conceived as. That his viewpoint characters are always geeks of a sort is understandable—“write what you know”, right?—but nationality has always been Stephenson’s shortcut and it’s inescapable here, as characters repeatedly describe themselves and others with sweeping generalisations stated as fact: stubborn ruthless Russians, stoic mathematically-minded Hungarians, genial but bribe-happy Chinese peasantry, the list goes on.
Stephenson does this consistently throughout REAMDE, not to mention his back catalogue; perhaps it’s meant as a satirical statement about nationality in the (post)modern world? After all, none of us are immune to the temptations of stereotyping, a troublesome remnant of our tribal primate past, and nationality—despite the institutions on which it is based rusting away from within, or perhaps because of it—is an important tool in our attempts to comprehend the complexities of a system as big as the whole planet.
But I struggled not to be niggled by it here. My colleague Deb Chachra expressed this as well as it can be expressed: Stephenson can write one character brilliantly, namely the plucky, determined and super-smart oddball geek who rises to the occasion when the chips are down. There are male and female versions here in REAMDE, and at an attitudinal level they’re all but indistinguishable; they’re vividly drawn, fully possessed of fictive life on the page, but it’s as if brilliant actors have run up against a director who refuses to let them transcend his original pen-portraits. And once we get beyond our viewpoint characters and into the supporting cast, it’s all regional and/or professional stereotypes, the sort of characters credited at the end of cheap action movies as “Psychotic Russian Mob Boss”, “Usefully Corrupt Chinese Receptionist #2” or “Second Jihadist From The Left”. In a symbolic post-cyberpunk novel like Snow Crash, where nationality is a target of satire and deconstruction, one can make a case for this sort of characterisation as intrinsic to the metaphor; in a mimetic thriller, however, that case is very weak. To be clear, there’s no whitewashing or nastiness at work: just a frustrating flatness of affect that’s difficult to reconcile with the great skills Stephenson brings to bear in other areas.
Perhaps I feel the need to pick holes (or fights) because of REAMDE’s ambition, and its genuine achievement. Even if you don’t get on with it, you’d be hard pressed to maintain the traditional critique of Stephenson as an author who hides behind linguistic flim-flam: his command of the text of REAMDE—from sentence level on upwards—is complete, and the two vast set-pieces at either end of the book are sustained demonstrations of skill and verbosity that make the Deliverator’s opening soliloquy from Snow Crash look like an early warm-up at a hipster poetry slam. And while it never makes the leap into truly science fictional territory, the lingering threat of such a transition haunts the nigh-continual action of the whole novel; as one character remarks of the story, well past the halfway point, you may well find yourself wondering “when [will] the pirates and dinosaurs turn up?”