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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Crude, depressing dross, 13 Dec 2005
By A Customer
This tedious novel seems to be an attempt to evoke the subtle style of William Gibson's classic "Neuromancer" series. It fails, badly. The thin gruel of the story seems to be endlessly padded out with brandnames; the cynical characters act randomly, without awakening empathy or understanding in the reader.A particularly jarring piece of Grimwood's incompetent prose from the first chapter narrates an interaction between a male technician and a female bodyguard: "The little sh!t liked her anyway. Maybe the b!tch could get him to smile." This fragment leaves the reader bemused -- whose thoughts are we following? Apperently hers at first -- but no woman describes herself as a "bitch", so it must be someone else! Grimwood seems to not understand the rules of simple English narrative, or is he just so excited at writing rude words that he forgets? After a couple of chapters, Grimwood's crude style really starts to grate. Too many sentences starting with "And" or "But" to give a sense of urgency, too many sentences ending with an ellipsis instead of a cleaner full stop. Perhaps sentences starting with "And" aren't so bad, but why does he start paragraphs with "And"? If the new sentence is linked to the previous one, then what's the new paragraph for? Even the typography irritates -- assimilated foreign words, long part of English, such as "quadriceps" are italicized throughout, yet far more alien words such as "yakuza" or "zaibiatsu" (sic) are left in roman, bemusing the intelligent reader.
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