Reamde (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

The Forthrast Family - A typical American family? Probably not. Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, ex-small time drug runner, haunted by the Furious Muses (echoes of his previous girlfriends), now the owner of T'Rain, the world's most successful online game; his younger brother Jacob "Jake" Forthrast, a born again Christian and Survivalist; his elder brother John Forthrast, Vietnam veteran with two high-tech artificial legs; his sister Patricia, killed by a bolt of lightning, and his adopted niece Zula Forthrast who walked to Sudan from Eritrea to escape a war.

Normal they might not be, but when Zula is kidnapped by the Russian Mafia after her boyfriend failed to deliver on a dodgy deal, they react as any family would and pull together to try and find a way to rescue her.

This book is enormous! It is 1000 pages long and none of that is filler. What this length of story delivers is a tremendous and detailed back story for all of the vast array of characters, from the Forthrast family, to Abdullah Jones, the enigmatic Welsh Jihadist, to Marlon, a Chinese gold farmer turned virus writer and many many more.

This book is also a very American story. The Forthrast family may not be an ordinary family, and even though a lot of unusual things happen to them, these events are often contrasted with the more ordinary side of American life, including things like shopping at Walmart, RVs, Starbucks, family reunions, Thanksgiving, gunshops etc. At some points in the story I felt I saw some flashes of the writing of that master of the bizarre American story, Thomas Pynchon - but in a much more accessible and readable form.

The story features believable and beautifully developed characters, fast action, a superb plot, a brilliant ending, and even some tongue in cheek humour (A Legendary Deluxe Platinum Collectors Edition of T'Rain - complete with Bonus Material, anyone?) I haven't even mentioned the computer virus from which this book takes its name! There really are stories within stories within stories!

You can probably tell I really enjoyed this book, but I should probably confess to being a huge fan of Neal Stephenson. I have all his books including the wonderful Cryptonomicon, and my own personal favourite The Diamond Age, so this book would have had to have tried very hard for me not to like it. It is different to his other work though and is easily his most accessible book to date. The world in which this story is set is not a world of historical events, science fiction or fantasy (other than the elements surrounding the online game T'Rain), it is simply our contemporary world.

Overall - 5 stars! You will invest a considerable amount of time in reading this book. It took me two weeks to finish it - but I have to say that this was time very well spent indeed!

I have been almost worshipfully keen on Neal Stephensons work since I first came in contact with "The Diamond Age", and worked my way through his list. Each piece was differently brilliant, managed to give penetrating insight to arcane areas of the human experience, with amazing characterisation, and a delivery that spanned from techno-fetishism to humour......so it was with Great Anticipation that I discovered that another title was out.
The sad truth is that "Reamde" was ok, but something was missing. The choice to create a straight thriller resulted in a lot of back to back action sequences (which he's always been good at, don't get me wrong) which ended up just feeling a bit tired by the end. The magic just wasn't there, and I know that it'll stay on my shelf for years, while the others get taken out and re-read and lent out to people enthusiastically.

It feels like sacreliege, but I just didn't love it.

This was my first Neal Stephenson novel, and although I note that others have said this one isn't his best, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Although it's over a thousand pages long, Stephenson manages to maintain a cracking pace throughout.

There is a lot of backstory about the characters, particularly Richard Forthrast and the Forthrast family, but this didn't seem to slow the book down too much. Most of it was interesting to read, and I liked the way the backstory added some colour to his characters. Perhaps the female characters were all a bit too much like female versions of James Bond, but at least they were all different nationalities, with different backgrounds!

This is a very American novel - the Forthrast family highlighted lots of aspects of a very American way of life, and the descriptions of the mountains, road travel, and Richard's ski resort, added colour to the novel. For a non-American, they gave the book an air of reality that it needed to keep it grounded, as well as providing an interesting setting. Parts of the book also took place in China. There were some fascinating descriptions here too - although I didn't find they drew the reader in with the same sense of actually being there. Perhaps that's inevitable for a Western reader. Stephenson can describe action in the online world just as well as in the real world, and that brings me to my only real disappointment with the book. I thought initially that the book was going to be about conflicts between the two worlds of T'Rain and real life, but about half way through, the world of T'Rain got sidelined. I appreciate the real life action is easier to sustain, but somehow, based on what I'd heard about Stephenson, I was expecting more cyberpunk and less real life. It was hard to be disappointed for long though, as the rest of the book was still a good read.