Thursday, May 20, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox

 




The Absolute Book is a fantasy novel by New Zealand author Elizabeth Knox, which came out last year in New Zealand and on Western shores this year after what was apparently some good press and a bidding war for the publication rights.  A review of the book on the Tor.com website, where I find a lot of my more obscure books (believe it or not), put it on my radar, although I had to push it back a few times from my library holds due to having too many books to read.  So when I finally had time to read it, I was curious how it would turn out, especially with me having kind of forgotten most of the context of the original review that I read of the book.  

Unfortunately, The Absolute Book just did not work for me and feels like an utter mess.  The book attempts to combine a number of religious, mythological, and fantasy concepts and settings, often without explanation, without taking the time to develop believable character reactions to facing such concepts.  It's a book that's a bit too obsessed for me in descriptions over characters, although to me even those descriptions (which I am never really that caring about) are often not done well to my eye, and has a bad habit of just assuming that readers and the characters are familiar with the mythological concepts being referenced so it never has to explain them.  Add in some really bad references to my own religion, and well - this is the rare book I have to give the contrary opinion of, and recommend against picking up.
----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
Taryn Cornick's sister Beatrice was killed by a man who deliberately swerved his car to hit her and then stole her body.  And when the man is sentenced to only a few years' jail time due to a manslaughter conviction, Taryn finds herself a little lost....until telling the story to a stranger results in that stranger offering, for seemingly no compensation at all, to take care of the murderer when he gets out.  And so, Beatrice's killer meets a mysterious death, with no connection to Taryn.  

Years later, Taryn is still living a lost kind of life, even if successful, with both a PhD and a highly successful non-fiction book about libraries and their destruction throughout history, a book partly inspired by her time with her sister in their grandfather's library in childhood.  But when a footnote in her book, referring to a strange scroll box called the "Firestarter" for surviving a number of library fires throughout history, comes to the attentions of a group of strange men, Taryn finds herself coming to the attention of a cop and MI5 agent who think her somehow connected not just to the death of Beatrice's killer, but an international conspiracy.  

But it's not the mundane world whom Taryn has connections to, but a strange world of Gods, The Sidhe, Angels and Demons, and a being named Shift who might not fit in any of those categories, who comes to Taryn seeking help and to be helped - and who, with the connections of Taryn's past, present, and future, might change the world for all people going forward......
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The Absolute Book is a bit of a mess in a narrative - a fantasy novel that seemingly wants to be epic fantasy without the length for it, that wants to throw in lots of descriptions while also skipping character work, and wants to throw in references to mythology and real world religions and cultures without ever explaining those references much - if at all - assuming it gets them right in the first place.  The book is mostly told from the perspective of Taryn, although Jacob (the cop who is investigating her) becomes a secondary protagonist POV character and we have at times people telling Taryn stories from their own perspective and histories.  But again, the book assumes the reader knows an awful lot from the start - and it assumes the same of its characters - so for example, when the Sidhe first appear, the book assumes the reader knows what they are and that they have a weakness to iron or that they might tithe souls to hell, without ever explaining such things.  Or when two ravens show up who are quickly revealed to be the ravens of Odin, the reader and characters are expected to immediately know what that means.  Knox accomplishes this by seemingly having the main characters also utterly familiar with these stories, so that they never need them explained themselves, and if you're a brand new fantasy reader reading this, you will be absolutely and completely lost

Which might be fine if it developed good characters, or the characters' responses to these revelations made sense, or if the character arcs were interesting but.....no.  Taryn has two past events that stay in her mind, the death of her sister and a fire set by a seemingly mad man in her grandfather's library when she and her sister were kids, and the book tries to make the former more important to her character but it's honestly less important to the plot than the latter and just feels utterly detached.  She constantly is facing revelations that would make someone have some pretty strong reactions - she'd been possessed by a demon!  the Sidhe are tithing thousands of human souls to hell to extend their life! Shift might lose his memories!  Jacob is being bewitched by a jealous sidhe! - and her reactions are nearly always just entirely muted or cut off - the one time she has a big reaction to what the sidhe are doing with the humans they take, she's treated as wrong for it and then her outrage burns out and is cut off by other events.  And the book tries to make her out to be some kind of hero, but honestly, she basically does nothing the entire book except point the Sidhe characters in the right direction at times.  So you have a character who doesn't do anything, whose character reactions and development is a mess, and who the book wants to treat as some kind of hero.  

The same is true of other characters, particularly Jacob - who goes from the police detective who has a passion for knowing more than others, who sort of falls for Taryn, then gets bewitched by a sidhe...and the other character just sort of shrug and hope he'll break out of it?  Like he winds up basically doing nothing, and at one point he is supposedly angry at Taryn for like 1 second before the Sidhe interactions moot that whole point, not that we really see the impact of that anger.  Shift probably gets the most character development of the non-human characters, but even his whole plot role is basically "Half-Sidhe searching for his birthright so he can use his powers to make things better, even as everyone sort of wants him to be something he's not and to give up the people he's helped"....except his attitude is so matter of fact and mercurial it never really feels like he cares that much about helping people other than the few who get his attention?  And the plot does not help here, with it returning random characters at random times - the Muleskinner, the dude who kills Beatrice's killer for Taryn early on for no compensation, comes back to.....get revenge on her?  Because he loved her or something?  Like what?  

I should also add that some of the references to my own culture/heritage - Jewish Mythology/Culture - are just either entirely wrong or bad, which makes me question all the references to other such cultures.  So for example, "Judaism" and "Jews" are referred to as the "Hebrew Religion" or "Hebrews" which just....no.  Then the book has a prominent real historical hasidic rabbi is alleged to have burnt his writings mysteriously (which afaict from research didn't happen and would be against what Jews generally believe), the book acts like the Torah is some mystical holy book and thus makes its mcguffin scroll the "Torah of Torahs" (again no), and once refers to Hell as something out of the writings of Hebrews and Christians, which again.....no.  I'm not too offended by it, it's not antisemitic just badly wrong, but it does make the book lose a lot of credibility when it's making Norse or Irish mythology references instead.  

I don't like to call a book necessarily bad - especially when other reviewers have loved this, it could just be that I didn't really get the plot or it's not the book for me.  But when it messes up my own heritage in its references, it doesn't get the benefit of the doubt I might otherwise give it, so yeah, hard pass on this one, and I'd recommend you read something else.  
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