Review copy provided by Tor Books.
The first thing about this book is that it nails the voice. It’s a 1930s British spy novel, and Rajaniemi gets that, down to the bones and, er, ectoplasm. It is intensely atmospheric; while the WWI of this book is not our WWI and the thirties that ensue are not our thirties, they have the same emotional heft, the same grit and shadow as ours. I like this a lot.
Second, what it has is follow-through on its worldbuilding. I watch a lot of procedurals with my workouts–no, a lot–no, really really a lot–and they quite often want to veer at least temporarily into an episode that has ghosts. But they don’t want to think about the implications of the kind of ghosts they’ve chosen: how much they can observe the world of the living, how much they can interact with physical objects, what effects that would have on life in general and the setting of the procedural in specific. Because they don’t want to write a ghost story, they want to write a procedural and do a little flirting on the side.
Hannu Rajaniemi wanted to write a ghost story. He wanted to think very, very hard about what all the implications would be if we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that spirits could interact with our world in certain specified ways, that people could then build technologies and social structures around. And so there is a story with heart here, with very human characters doing very human things–but the world-building was just lovely, because it thought through surveillance and evidence in a world with ghosts, it thought through how you would go about building spy networks when death did not release your agents, and the story that ensued is a very emotionally complex human story with the speculative premise utterly essential.
I liked this a lot, and I recommend it highly.
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