You can imagine that when Cory Doctorow reviewed The Caryatids on BoingBoing, I went straight onto Amazon to buy it. His enthusiasm for the book was boundless, and to be honest I was expecting an absolutely top drawer science fiction novel about climate disaster and its aftermath.
Read Doctorow’s review and you too may be inspired to buy it.
I was disappointed, however, not least because this isn’t actually a novel at all. It’s a Menippean satire in which a single character (in this case, a clone, so a character with multiple personae) circulates the world of 2060 and essentially interviews a variety of other characters with particular points of view. That’s it, really. It’s not that there are no ideas of interest here (all the ideas in Cory Doctorow’s review are present and correct), but there’s no narrative plot, no satisfying resolution, and no character development.
There’s a lot of gnomic speechifying, though the dialogue is oddly stilted (perhaps deliberately, given the characters’ Balkan origins), and so this reminded me of early Don Delillo novels like Americana for a lot of its length. Not as funny, though. In fact, there’s not a lot more here than you read in Doctorow’s review: you get the idea, but then it doesn’t go anywhere.
Disappointing. And by no means the best novel of 2009, I hope.
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