Great North Road [Paperback]

If "Game of Thrones" can be turned into a TV series then I think Peter Hamilton's latest novel should be turned into a show too. The Great Road North is an excellent story: imaginative, clever, and well paced; it blends sci-fi with crime, horror, doomed romance, and a bit of political/action thriller. I had been looking forward to this book since reading the plot summary several months ago and I was not disappointed. To me, a long-time fan, it seemed like he had gone through all his previous novels, cherry picked the best elements and weaved them all together.

Talking of weaving, one of the most enjoyable and challenging things about Hamilton is tying his story threads back together using the limited (but very deliberate) clues he writes in before the plot is revealed. I got a fair few, but some of them eluded me until about page 930... It's always fun trying to guess, but I don't think I'll ever be able to call him predictable.

Another thing I really enjoyed was the way he wrote against a believable background, speculating on where modern science and technology might take us and describing how people will live in the near future; think Michio Kaku but with verve, humour, and a lot of very British style. Of course with sci-fi it has to go a little bit further and we have seemingly implacable aliens, spaceships and strange planets. However, unlike the Void trilogy, it doesn't stray into fantasy; believability makes this story more accessible.

Of course Hamilton already has a great reputation for his story-telling skills, but I think that with Great North Road he has improved his writing style. Recent novels have had a large cast of characters, which often led to uneven coverage. In this novel he has concentrated on the key characters and they all come across strongly: Angela the tough girl with a mysterious background; Vance the zealous Human Defence Agency colonel; and Sid the cunning detective. The secondary characters like Ian, Saul and Rebka are also much more fleshed out than their counterparts in his other novels.

Some readers might find the length off-putting here, but if as an author you're going to conjure up an epic story then you might as write it out in full. Which takes me back to my first point: it's about time some of our best writers got their stories on screen, not just to dispel the myth that British sci-fi is all about histrionic blokes in police boxes and supermarionation puppets, but also to show that it can compete with the best of the stuff beaming across the Atlantic. It would be great if TV producers took notice of novels like this.

However, having praised it so thoroughly, there was one small problem with this book:- I don't see how he can top it. ;)

Firstly, I'll state I'm a big fan of Peter's work, his previous SF really is top of the game British SF in a style that is currently without equal.

So I eagerly started this book with high expectations of more of the same...

Sadly, I felt a little let down with this one Peter.

The detective part started well but seemed to tail off as the story went on. The alien world "bug hunt" was pretty dull and tedious, lacking pace and bite. Finally, at the end, the grand reveal was just a bit...meh.

I don't mind a long book but this definitely seemed to drag by, with each session I spent reading it not seeming to have advanced the story much and in the end I felt like it was more of an endurance challenge than reading a rewarding story. Its not a "hard read", its easy to digest but just too tedious.

I'm sure Peter will be back with something new soon(ish) though and once again I know I will be pouncing on it eagerly but please, two strikes and you're out with me...

Ok, just finished this book. Very slow and somewhat disjointed plot. It struggles to be a satisfying SF read, as a police procedural novel it's flawed. The characters (there are an awful lot of them) are a bit flat. I really didn't care for them. It would have benefited from severe editing and removing 300 pages.

I hope this is not Mr Hamilton's new direction as I've read all of his output to date but couldn't manage another like this. Hugely disappointed, which is a shame because a lot of work must have gone into it, but, just not to my liking.