Documenting history is clearly a difficult task. What gets into the history book and is taken for fact can be anywhere from zero to one hundred percent wrong. This book takes us a hundred years in the future to look back at a key moment in time from 2014. So of course you have to know going in that what we think in that future time will probably diverge from the truth.
Knowing this means that it sort of spoiled the twist for me. From the start we can kind of see what will happen, despite the author’s attempts to bury us with red herrings and “historical” details of how the world went to shit in the past hundred years.
The first portion of the book (in the future) goes back and gives us an incredible amount of detail into what a researcher thinks happened around this key event, and we learn how obsessed he is. But I think all the effort we put into reading this didn’t quite pay off at the end.
It is an interesting idea for a book – the storyline and approach are unique and we can feel the tension building up as we wonder what is really true (and whether we will actually find out by the end of the book). The writing is quite good – especially the poetry and descriptions of nature. Little hints are planted here and there that will only be found upon reading the end of the book – I liked this attention to detail.
Although the author really lays on the exposition to lead us through history I did like seeing how these events changed the lifestyle of the people remaining in that distant future, and I wish there was more time spent on showing it – but that would make the book a little too SciFi, I guess.
Next I am reading Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson.
