I did. I thought that would be obvious from my review.



Propped up?



I tried to avoid making the review a comparative study. Perhaps I tried too hard.

On the whole, yes, it lives up to expectations. I prefer The Gone-Away World, but I think that is due to my latching on to particular things (like soft style martial arts) and having trouble letting go.

I also think The Gone-Away World had a more unified ... direction (although that may seem like a strange way of describing that book): the British detective story is different from the American (Doyle vs Chandler), and while it may seem like an odd way of characterising them, I think I would place TGAW in the former camp and this in the latter. But that analogy depends to a large extent of you understanding how my brain works, and may be a lost case. While this novel also brings strings together in the end, there is no big reveal of the TGAW type (rather, several smaller reveals along the way).

This book is also more obviously political than the first (while I will maintain that TGAW is VERY political, it was perhaps less overt, and less explicitly tied to current political events). I don't think either of these points are a matter of better or worse, but rather different.

It also has some very different formal characteristics. TGAW was a first person narration tied to a particular voice and presenting a fairly linear development of a life (albeit with the complications you know of). This book has a much more complicated structure in that way (different perspectives, jumps backwards and forwards in time in a way which allows the meaning of events to become apparent in between the development of the "present" story), but because it is a move away from the surprising ending, it may not feel like that.

I know I said it was different, then went on to use almost the very same words to describe this new book: that is due to a continuity in thematic concerns, which I find fascinating (and a similarity in style).

Does that answer your question?