Book Review: Dead Lines, by Greg Bear
We listened to the audiobook version of this on the way to and back from Missouri. We're home now (yeah!), and since big slushy dollops of wet snow are falling outside, this is a good time to catch up on my voxing.
The only other book I've ever read by Greg Bear was called Eon, and I don't remember being particularly impressed by it, either. The problem is that I really want to be impressed. I like Bear's concepts, I like his premises, I like the plot, and help me I even like the characters, to a point, but the glue that's supposed to bring it altogether is altogether the wrong formula.
The first problem is the characters. I said I like the characters, and I do, because they are not two dimensional. They are real people, with histories and complex reactions. The only problem is that if they really were real people, I wouldn't want to meet them, and I certainly wouldn't want to accompany them for anything near the amount of time to complete an adventure such as this one. The problem is that the characters are realistic, but they are not likeable.
Our hero in Dead Lines is a former pornographer turned B-Movie director turned henchman for an old, retired producer in California. We are told that the protagonist, Peter, is charming and has a way with women, and for proof of this we are told, again, that he has slept with hundreds of women. We don't see any of this charm, either through his actions or his dialogue. In fact, he is a man of few words who wanders through life depressed and barely verbal. He has good reason to be this way, since his daughter died some two years prior to the beginning of the story, murdered by an unknown killer. The problem isn't that he's a sullen, despondent man, but rather that the exposition and the other characters keep telling us that he's other than what the author shows us through the characters own actions and speech. Further, I have to say I like the sullen, despondent Peter better than the promiscuous playboy the author ensures us that Peter really is.
And Peter's not alone in his promiscuity. Every character in the book seems to think of sex as a handshake, and jealousy doesn't exist. I realize that there are people like that in the world - many of them, in fact - but gathering them all together like they're at a convention and then populating a novel with them doesn't make for a good story. Since their sexual exploits have absolutely nothing to do with the concept of the novel, don't advance the plot, and don't contribute to the themes, I really have to wonder why the author feels it necessary to use these types of characters to tell his story.
My next complaint is that occasionally to frequently, Bear digresses into long bouts of details concerning the action that, likewise, don't further the plot. If this weren't an audiobook, I would look up a relevant passage and quote it for proof, but trust me, it's there. We are given blow by blow descriptions of action that are completely mundane. When Thomas Hardy did this, we forgave him, but most modern authors have learned from television one of the few useful things it has contributed to literature: the cutaway.
Finally, some part of the story make very little sense, and unfortunately I can't go into it without revealing spoilers, but trust me, things occasionally happen in this book that leave you scratching your head and wondering what the author ate before dreaming that one up.
All of that being said, Bear does have a nack for concepts, and Dead Lines shows that. The idea is that wireless bandwidth is running out - cell phones, wireless laptops, PDAs, car computers, etc. are using up all of the available wireless bandwidth and it will all soon be gone. A new telecomm startup, however, believes that it is has found a way around this. The engineer/scientist/founder has discovered a way to increase the "information permeability of space," thereby allowing users of special phones, called "trans" to call each other using a sort of sub-space that exists below the quantum level. No cell towers or infrastructure necessary.
The problem is that by increasing the information of permeability of space, these devices also allow other types of information, previously invisible and confined to sub-space, to communicate and have an effect on the macro world. Specifically, people start seeing ghosts. Our protagonist, Peter, starts to see them before most people, and though its never explained it's implied that it's because he is still pre-occupied with his daughter's murder and the recent death of a friend.
That's all I can say without revealing too much, but I will say that despite it's problems, Dead Lines is worth reading.
