- Paperback: 432 pages
- Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd (5 April 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 043400846X
- ISBN-13: 978-0434008469
- Product Dimensions: 23 x 15.2 x 3.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,390,476 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Plowing The Dark
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
In Plowing the Dark, Richard Powers returns to the richly promising realm of cyber-invention, one of our age's few remaining frontiers and a siren call to restless intellects. No one who enjoyed his remarkable breakthrough novel, Galatea 2.2, will be surprised by this. Here, an old friend recruits a disillusioned New York artist named Adie Klarpol to work on "the Cavern". TeraSys, a Seattle-based company, is building this virtual environment at great expense in the hope that it will lower its enormous tax liability as well as, in the long run, provide the template for all such virtual playrooms. "Millions of dollars of funding," Adie's friend Steve tells her when she arrives on the job, "and nobody around this dump can draw worth squat." Suitably impressed by the Cavern's programming, and slowly absorbing its dazzling capacity to project vivid and convincing illusions, she sets herself the task of creating a faithful 3-D version of Rousseau's Dream. Her painstaking efforts in the Realization Lab are aided by a host of supporting characters, one of whom, Spider Lim, proves so sensitive that he gets a bruise from bumping into one of Adie's virtual tree branches. And when the central female figure appears among the foliage, Lim is irresistibly drawn in, marvelling that
their first successful leaf, twirling in the Cavern darkness, had led to this--this pale, lentil body turning in his mind's dark. This scapular profile, these tow-line braids. Her hips fell somewhere on the Limaçon of Pascal. The squares of her breasts' abscissas and ordinates summed to an integer. This was the math of women, a field he'd given up studying, female equations whose complexities had long ago surpassed his ability to differentiate.
Powers' lush language corresponds to Adie's vision of Rousseau's jungle, and in turn to Rousseau's own ecstatic vision. Yet there is also something elegiac in the author's lavish descriptions of the Cavern's miracles, as if he were offering a late, last flowering of words before the cultural ascendancy of the image. Great, quotable chunks weight every page. Even readers fond of extravagant prose may find Powers's verbal persistence wearying, though it suggests that there are still contradictions and subtleties of mind that no image can track. --Regina Marler, Amazon.com
Product Description
In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual reality researchers races to complete the Cavern, a blank white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn city on the shores of the Mediterranean, an American is held hostage in an empty white room ...
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Powers is a literary superstar in the US, regarded alongside the likes of DeLillo, John Barth & William Gaddis. Here in the UK his books are (criminally) almost unobtainable, but demand being sought out for the power of his literary visions and the beauty of his prose.
Plowing The Dark (typically for Powers) tells two separate stories which parallel, rather than merge with one another. Both are set on the cusp of the 1990's and examine the nature of identity and imagination in a world of rapidly changing political forces.
More than 2/3 of the novel is given over to the story of an artist who is recruited to assist in the construction of a virtual reality room. Whilst certainly interesting this aspect of the book is not always successfully realised, the various characters tend to merge into one another and the dialogue, jammed full of techno-speak, sometimes seems jarringly unrealistic.
However, interwoven with this is the other story, that of an English teacher kidnapped in Beirut, and this is nothing short of astonishing. The power and beauty of the writing is just overwhelming, and the story itself perfectly paced and ultimately deeply moving.
Whilst Powers' experiment is far from flawless the scope and ambition of the novel is admirable, something that seems so lacking in much European literatute.
So, in short, read 'Plowing The Dark', and then check out Powers' greatest work: 'Gain', 'Galatea 2.2' & 'The Gold-Bug Variations'.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I don't think it matters how long you wait, general thoughts are the best people seem to do with this Author. This is the first book of his I have read, and I agree with those that say it is unlike anything they have read before.
I have never read prose that is so frenetic in it's pace, and to make the experience more interesting, each sentence is so engorged with words, that are carefully even artfully chosen, that dense does not begin to describe this Author's use of language. Once you become accustomed to the pace and richness of what he writes, he becomes readable. Umberto Eco comes to mind, but this Author is not as burdensome, you participate as a reader more quickly. I also love Mr. Eco's work; I just never find the reading comfortable.
His knowledge of his material is encyclopedic. He creates characters that are as unique and varied and sometimes eccentric, as any other Author I have read. And what does he create with this?
There is a group building "The Cavern", think of it as a very early Beta version of the Holodeck on The Enterprise. This is not a place for recreation; their goals are varied and constantly evolving. This room of no time, which is supposed to eventually be the perfect VR World, the perfect forecaster of whatever you like, Or for others an apocalyptic place, its potential too horrible to imagine.
All of this plays with another story in the background that superficially could not be less related, and this is probably the genius of the book. There are a number of Authors writing that try to be clever and original; they fail with the former as they lack the latter. Their stories don't hold up because you know the end, halfway or even less into the book. This time even when you think you know, even after the end has revealed itself, the book stays with you and you continue to sort out the dozens of thoughts and philosophies, which the characters from Countries as different as Armenia, and Ireland, and Korea bring to the story.
The book pulls all of your emotional strings, and most of your moral and ethical ones as well. If you find yourself immersed in this Author's writing you are in for one very enigmatic, puzzling, fantastical ride.
I have never read prose that is so frenetic in it's pace, and to make the experience more interesting, each sentence is so engorged with words, that are carefully even artfully chosen, that dense does not begin to describe this Author's use of language. Once you become accustomed to the pace and richness of what he writes, he becomes readable. Umberto Eco comes to mind, but this Author is not as burdensome, you participate as a reader more quickly. I also love Mr. Eco's work; I just never find the reading comfortable.
His knowledge of his material is encyclopedic. He creates characters that are as unique and varied and sometimes eccentric, as any other Author I have read. And what does he create with this?
There is a group building "The Cavern", think of it as a very early Beta version of the Holodeck on The Enterprise. This is not a place for recreation; their goals are varied and constantly evolving. This room of no time, which is supposed to eventually be the perfect VR World, the perfect forecaster of whatever you like, Or for others an apocalyptic place, its potential too horrible to imagine.
All of this plays with another story in the background that superficially could not be less related, and this is probably the genius of the book. There are a number of Authors writing that try to be clever and original; they fail with the former as they lack the latter. Their stories don't hold up because you know the end, halfway or even less into the book. This time even when you think you know, even after the end has revealed itself, the book stays with you and you continue to sort out the dozens of thoughts and philosophies, which the characters from Countries as different as Armenia, and Ireland, and Korea bring to the story.
The book pulls all of your emotional strings, and most of your moral and ethical ones as well. If you find yourself immersed in this Author's writing you are in for one very enigmatic, puzzling, fantastical ride.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
35 reviews
30 of 30 people found the following review helpful
A cracking good tale in crackling prose
17 Jun 2000
Format:Hardcover
"This room is never anything o'clock." That's the first line of this marvelous tale about two rooms a world apart--a virtual reality lab in Seattle and the room in Beirut where a man is held in solitary confinement by fundamentalist terrorists. What ties those two rooms together is the power of imagination both to destroy and to save. Powers manages to create a forward-rushing tale using such poetic language that one has to force oneself to slow down and savor his slightly quirky but always evocative prose. Two passages picked literally at random (I closed my eyes and pointed my finger) from page 11: "They drove out to his lair in the silence of small talk." "She did well around black. She understood it: one of the big two, not a true color, yet fraternizing with the deepest maroons, hoping to smuggle itself back over hue's closely guarded border."
Powers is one of that group of young American writers who are so imaginative, so stylish, so knowing that their prose snaps like a flag in a gale. Yet he's not a smart aleck like some of the others. You care about his characters. You care "how it turns out."
His previous novel, "Gain", seemed a bit flaccid to me. In "Plowing the Dark" he's back in top form.
24 of 24 people found the following review helpful
a stunner
7 Jun 2000
Format:Hardcover
An extraordinary novel full of the clash of light and dark. Two people in two separate and very different rooms: one is a solitary hostage in Lebanon, who fills his room with memories and the wanderings of his mind: the other is in Seattle designing a virtual reality room, filled with colour, making 'real' the creations of her imagination. Though their experiences couldn't be more different they share a great deal, not least their discovery of the way war and the needs of the militant can intrude on so-called ordinary life. I found myself thinking about this book long after I put it down - wonderful stuff.
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Gorgeous, Stunning
13 Jun 2000
Format:Hardcover
This book just swept me away. Richard Powers is one of my favorite writers of all time and Plowing the Dark shows Powers in prime form. Like his other novels, this one is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally rich. And yet -- how does he do it? -- this book is an absolute orginal! It provides all the expected pleasures of a Powers novel, yet it reminds me of nothing I've ever read before (by Powers or any other writer). Plowing is an absorbing story told in gorgeous prose. A must read!
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