The Centauri Device (S.F. Masterworks) (Paperback)

Far from 'empathizing' with his characters, I found almost all, at best, unengaging, and, at worst, actively repellent. Being a huge fan of Iain M. Banks, I am unable to find any comparison between this work & his own. I am at a loss as to why he should apparently admire this dreadful book.

"...never verbose or pretentious..."? Au contraire, it is never anything else, and the prose is empty and meaningless, when it is not utter rubbish. It puts me in mind of the archetypical Main Street of a Western film set, where the buildings are merely facades with nothing behind them. At worst, he describes a room as 'frugal & austere' and then procedes with 'little chintzy curtains, a stained wooden floor and carpets of Turkey' Chintz curtains - frugal? Turkish carpets - austere? Uh, I think not!

The book is riddled with clumsy deus ex machina, one of my pet hates. The 'hero' is moved smoothly from chapter to chapter, not because he would naturally do so, but because people (usually one 'villain' or another) conveniently turn up, for no apparent reason other than that the author needs them to do so. He could easily have suggested, for instance, that the various groups pursuing Truck had bugged his clothing, but no, he seems more concerned with his florid phrases. Characters, particularly the military, behave in a singularly stupid fahion, because the author wishes them to do so. One group in the book has conveniently 'found' some alien ships in deep space & have, apparently, easily been able to utilise them (because the plot requires it). Speaking of which, Mr Harrison's grasp of military tactics & the advance of technology is pathetic - he describes the culminating space battle, in unlikely terms, as though it were a WWI dogfight! If it were written in the 40's it would be a poor effort, as it was written in the 70's it is simply woeful. Thankfully, he leaves the hard science of how things work very, very vague, since what little he does say suggests a surfeit of flowery language & a deficit of any scientific knowledge at all.

From first to last, this is a pitiful effort. If I may alliterate, this is poor pulp packaged in pretentious prose. It seems to me as if, throughout the entirety of the book, the author is crying "look what wonderful phrases I can write!" The phrases aren't wonderful, and there is nothing else to the book. As my title says, a lamb in wolf's clothing, it should never, in my opinion, have got anywhere near a 'masterworks' series.

OK. I didn't like the book. I haven't liked a couple of others in the series, but this is the first that I really felt was poor. none of the characters come across as anything other than cardboard cutouts, and it is rather hard to care what, if anything, happens to any of them. In many ways, the shame is that they fail to all die 100 pages earlier.

There are good elements to the story. The actual plot, in it's summarised version, is quite interesting (shame that it has so little to do with the story, then - the last 20 pages or so are used to dispose of a plot for which he couldn't be bothered to think of a conclusion). The portrayal of a grimy, unpleasant world is, in places, quite evocative, and reminiscent of Bladerunner.

But his desire to show off his vocabulary, and to shoe-horn the story into set pieces where he can do so, heavily detracts from the novel. His characters are uninteresting, and Truck doesn't even work well as an anti-hero.

One of the quotes on the blurb on the back of the book reads "No one uses words like M. John Harrison." For this, I am extremely grateful.