What did I just read?! If you’re familiar with this popular scifi book about a secret government agency protecting the world from mysterious anomalies that can disappear themselves from people’s minds (i.e. everyone forgets they exist) you might be thinking that I’m doing schtick. You might think I’m making jokes in the tone of this book, which is a little bit weird, somewhat cryptic and mysterious, and relatively hard to follow. But what I’m really saying is that even after reading (i.e. listening) to this book for 8 hours, most of what I could follow and remember (not a joke) comes only from the first quarter of the book. 

This story focuses (I guess) on Marie Quinn, the director of this agency, whose job it is to understand and handle “unknowns” (i.e. antimemetic entities and phenomena). It’s a bit like the X-Files or Men in Black, but with stranger, otherworldly phenomena that focus on thoughts, ideas, perception and concepts. It’s a bit hard to explain (again, not making a joke) because the author really likes to play around with concepts, especially related to the mind. So this antimemetics division (and the punchline that is the title of this book does actually come up a few times — groan!) has numerous files on these antimemetic phenomena, and we get to read these files within the story. This is the part of the book that I enjoyed the most. The descriptions of these things that range from beings that imitate human form to get into your thoughts and consume them, all the way to gigantic monoliths covered with mysterious symbols, are really very cool and cleverly thought up. These parts actually reminded me of some of the Simon Stålenhag books I was reading last year (e.g. Tales from the Loop) which included a lot of imagined science presented in kind of academic or prosaic tone.

Unfortunately these unknowns were not really the focus of this narrative; this was not an encyclopedia of antimemetic phenomena. We sort of follow Marie Quinn, but the narrative is actually pretty disjointed. Partly that’s because the antimemetic aspect causes a lot of resets, where information and events are forgotten. The narrative tries to simulate some of that effect. On top of that, the narrative is a bit non-linear as well, jumping around in the storyline. Add to that the relatively forgettable (again, not a joke) names of the characters; the difficult-to-distinguish ID numbers used to reference the unknowns (e.g. U-3125); and the fairly clinical and colourless language used throughout the story (perhaps intentionally) that felt more like reading stage directions than an engaging story, and it’s perhaps no surprise that following the story felt like riding a mechanical bull on overdrive. I’m sure many people could follow better than I could, and that’s why this book is so popular, but I fell off the plot repeatedly.

Speaking of plot, I hung on well enough to grasp that there was a major antimimetic entity that posed a threat to all humanity, and that a large part of the Antimemetics Division’s role was to find/create a solution or weapon against this entity. That was a very cool idea, somewhat Lovecraftian (which is something I look for). While there were parts, scenes, in the story of the fight against this cosmic horror that were pretty thrilling, but they lasted only moments and then I quickly fell off the plot when the scene changed. I confess it was only when I read the wikipedia synopsis after finishing this book that I could see the overall story.

Amazingly, despite my struggles with this book, I did not dislike it, and I actually enjoyed reading most of it. I might even revisit it one day now that I know what to look for. However, I still felt like a lot of the cool, imaginative, “world building” ideas could have had more focus, rather than focusing on what happened to the characters. The descriptions and narration could have been a lot more detailed, vivid and visual, and the writing could have been more emotionally engaging. Even though I am not a character-oriented reader, I think we could have gotten to know the characters a whole lot better if we were expected to care about them (or at least tell them apart) but perhaps that was not the goal. I don’t think that the author had any ambitions to write a timeless classic, but since this book grew out of something of a writing experiment or big creative exercise, perhaps it achieved its goals of being something different and fresh. Maybe that’s what it wants to be remembered for, and the rest can all be forgotten (that time, I meant it as a joke).

3 stars

Since you’ve read my post to the end, please let me know what you thought by leaving a comment.

Or better yet, please join me on GoodReads and follow what I’m reading:  https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/78985113-alvin-ng

Or join me on Fable: https://fable.co/alvin-ng-324926061648