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Plowing the Dark (Paperback)

by Richard Powers (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
RRP: £8.99
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Plowing the Dark + Gain: A Novel + Time of Our Singing
Price For All Three: £20.79

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  • This item: Plowing the Dark by Richard Powers

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Product details

  • Paperback: 415 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage (7 Feb 2002)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0099286726
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099286721
  • Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 13 x 3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 242,022 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #5 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > P > Powers, Richard

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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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.



Product Description

In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, virtual reality researchers race to complete the Cavern, a bland white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn city on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in an empty white room...Adie Klarpol, a disillusioned artist, is invigorated by the thrill of working with the Cavern's cutting-edge technology. As Cold War empires collapse and the Berlin Wall falls, she retreats into the cyber-realities she has been hired to create. In Beirut, English teacher Taimur Martin is held in solitary confinement by Islamic fundamentalists, where he must keep his mind whole by the force of his memory alone. What can possibly joint two such remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these two people unwittingly build in common, where the strands of this wildly inventive novel coalesce into one.
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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Plowing the Dark
55% buy the item featured on this page:
Plowing the Dark 4.5 out of 5 stars (2)
£6.81
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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars I waited several days prior to writing about this book, 3 Nov 2002
By taking a rest - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: Plowing the Dark (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.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars a tale of two books, 29 Jun 2001
By T. BRANNEY (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Plowing the Dark (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'.

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