I had mixed feelings, reading this book. I had already read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and loved it, and so I did have high hopes, which may have been the problem; it's always better to go into a book without preconceptions.
The main issue I had with this book was the length and the way that the plot was resolved. I feel that this book would have been much stronger if it was shorter, and consequently if less was revealed by the end - Clarke could have left things much more mysterious and it would have worked very well with the plot because the wonder of this kind of world almost doesn't need explanations. Or, it should have been longer. I felt that there was just enough revealed to make me even more confused; the amount that I was given by the end of the book was like a grapevine dangled just out of reach.
A second problem was that I never really managed to connect to the narrator, though I hesitate to call that a problem because I'm not sure that I was meant to. The narrator is a character so far removed my own experiences that it makes perfect sense that we would share little common ground. Ultimately, I just felt that something was lacking in this book, and that fact stopped me from really being able to appreciate it.
The main issue I had with this book was the length and the way that the plot was resolved. I feel that this book would have been much stronger if it was shorter, and consequently if less was revealed by the end - Clarke could have left things much more mysterious and it would have worked very well with the plot because the wonder of this kind of world almost doesn't need explanations. Or, it should have been longer. I felt that there was just enough revealed to make me even more confused; the amount that I was given by the end of the book was like a grapevine dangled just out of reach.
A second problem was that I never really managed to connect to the narrator, though I hesitate to call that a problem because I'm not sure that I was meant to. The narrator is a character so far removed my own experiences that it makes perfect sense that we would share little common ground. Ultimately, I just felt that something was lacking in this book, and that fact stopped me from really being able to appreciate it.