Dancing with Bears

From my blog at www.lazerbrain.wordpress.com

Ok so, Michael Swanwick, has won a lot of awards. I loved his book “Vacuum Flowers” and I also liked two of his short stories, on of them being “Dalla Horse” I can't remember the other. Unfortunately this book was not nearly up to those standards. I give it two stars, simply because the book was well written, even if I had major issues with the plot and the characters.

The book is an extension of some short stories that Swanwick wrote (I think) about two confidence men, Darger and Surplus. This book follows their adventures to and in Moscow, Russia.

First off, I don't really feel like I understand the main characters any more after having read the book, than I did before hand. Maybe Swanwick did a lot more characterization in his other stories (which I haven't read), but basically I had no investment in these two. And these were ostensibly the protagonists, I felt even less attachment to the minor characters.

The second big beef I had was the humor. I feel like Darger and Surplus were supposed to be funny and amusing, and endear themselves to the reader because of it. Unfortunately this did not come across very well. It took me half the book to realize that scenes /circumstances that I had just read through without much thought, or even a, “That sound a bit rediculous, why is that here?” were supposed to be humorous in a slapstick/awkward circumstances kind of way. It just didn't come across very well.

Final beef: The plot. It seemed a little thin to me. It seemed mostly focused on the aforementioned “humorous” circumstances, and less on the plot as a whole. I think this could have been pulled off, if the humor worked better. However, I don't think we ever really have a good understanding of what Darger and Suplus's con was supposed to be. Ostensibly, this was the whole reason for their trip to Moscow in the first place, and if the con was a failure, it seems to me that it might have been better if we knew more of what their plan was, so as to see how much the con was blown to bits. That is just one example.

Anyway, I don't want to finish this review without giving Swanwick some pros for the world he built. It seems like it has a lot of potential. Post utopian decline precipitated by the rebellion of AI's and the resulting destruction of the internet. Really cool, I think it could be a great setting for stories to come, I just don't think its potential was fully realized.